Livestock Engineering Machinery and Techniques for Pig Husbandry

Indicator based monitoring systems and the approaches of "Precision Pig farming" gain in importance with increasing stock sizes of pig husbandries. For gestation sows the data of the electronic sow feeder and in addition the registration of drinking events and walking distances can serve the health monitoring. The animal itself as signal giver (drinking and feeding behavior, vocalization) comes to the fore in monitoring approaches for weaning and fattening pigs. A sensor based control of the sow inside the farrowing pen allows the early detection of farrowing or problematic situation for the sow or piglets. The topical main challenges of pre-cision livestock farming are in the meantime perhaps less in sensor development, but rather in processing and usability of the big data sets with the help of real-time analytic algorithms.