Background

At present, the operation of the entire animal farming industry is still very primitive.  The large number of pig stealing, faulty weights and swine fever, etc. is also a common problem faced by pig farming enterprises.  Chengdu SmartAHC, as an industry-leading smart breeding technology company, has applied IoT technology together with Chainway C71 UHF handheld terminals to helps pig farming enterprises to build smart pig breeding and traceability systems and realized the digitization of all the processes and traceability management of pig breeding.  The completely digitized management model, when compared to the traditional model, has enabled greatly reduced loss, improved breeding and management efficiency.

Challenges

  1. The traditional farmers by marking the edge of the pig ears to identify the pigs in the farm. In each important production milestone, the workers with their naked eye identified the ear marks and wrote down the information on paper. It was not only inefficient, but also limited in the quantity identified.  In addition, the risk of misidentifying ear marks increased as piglets grew up.
  2. The farmers could only tell how the pigs grew when they were ready to be delivered for sale. It was impossible to obtain real-time breeding and growth status. It was not convenient to adjust and optimize the breeding process.
  3. There were often problems such as untimely data entry, inaccurate event entry, and substandard performance appraisal, resulting in low management efficiency.
  4. The traditional operations model did not allow monitoring and management through from birth to delivery for sale for each pig. It was difficult to hold anyone accountable for bad meat.

Solution

Individual identification has been carried out by giving each pig an electronic ear tag with a unique code.  With the Chainway C71 built-in UHF mobile computer, basic information about each pig has been entered to establish and incorporate individual files into the information management system.  In the later breeding management process, the electronic ear tags of the pigs were scanned by the C71 UHF mobile computer to record in real time the physiological status indicators of the pigs.  The key information in the process of pig breeding, death, slaughter, circulation, sales and other phases was precisely recorded and analyzed through C71, helping farming enterprises achieve digitized close-loop management throughout the farming process from breeding to end sales and greatly improving the management quality.

Outcome

  1. The application of smart breeding and traceability system based on C71 mobile computer has supported the farming enterprises to realize the standardization, scaling and refinement of pig farming management and the cost.
  2. C71 has enabled quick count of the number of pigs with an accuracy rate reaching 99.9%, which has greatly reduced the workload of manual counts and improved efficiency.
  3. The real-time dynamic collection of accurate pig growth data employing C71 has reformed the lengthy data feedback mechanism of pig farming in the past.
  4. The application has realized the supervision and management from farm to table. The traceability of information throughout the process has also provided a basis for traceability of food source, which has contributed to the safety of meat products.

PDA configuration

Model: C71UHF

Main function: UHF RFID (based on Impinj E310 chip).

Source: https://www.chainway.net/Cases/Info/224