Quickly unlock your phone and click on an app. Right away, you can have access to a live video feed of inside your barn no matter your location.

With more technologies such as NUtrack being developed, producers can manage barns even more efficiently from their phones.

The NUtrack system, developed by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, allows producers to track the behavior of individual hogs in a housed operation. By monitoring behaviors such as walking, standing, lying down, and time at the waterers and feeders, production efficiency and welfare can be enhanced.

Even if swine producers check every hog every day in person for health and welfare, it is possible that something might be overlooked, so monitoring systems such as NUtrack offer an effective way — beyond the physical in-person observations — to catch potential issues before they become serious problems.

“Those observations are still a very limited snapshot in time,” says Benny Mote, UNL associate professor of animal science and swine Extension specialist. “It is a very limited window that we are in there looking at those animals.”

While producers try to be diligent while checking livestock, some oversight is bound to happen. With this new technology, 24/7 barn monitoring could offer another observation tool that will improve the overall health of the herd.

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Full body recognition

“Pigs can hide those symptoms from you in that little amount of time,” Mote says. “But if you are monitoring them 24/7, it is hard to hide those symptoms all the time.”

In swine confinement areas, it is difficult to use facial recognition to monitor pigs. To get the camera where it needs to be to catch facial recognition, it is susceptible to being damaged by the pigs.

“We were wondering, since we cannot always identify the face of the animal, if we could identify and maintain tracking based off of a single pig or their whole body,” Mote says.

ID POINTS: On an individual pig, there are four points that are recorded to make sure that the right pig is being identified with the NUtrack system. The usefulness of this technology spans from counting pigs to detecting abnormal behavior. (Courtesy of Benny Mote, UNL)

The NUtrack system locates its anatomical identification points on the left ear, right ear, shoulder, tail and snout to detect individual pigs.

Right now, Mote’s team is working on machine learning to develop a tagless tracking system. They have trained on more than 200,000 images of 170 pigs. During the first run, they were able to gain 75% accuracy and have since improved the accuracy number.

While the health and wellness of the pigs are of utmost importance to Mote’s team, they wanted to add technology that would be able to count pigs, as well, to improve the usefulness of the system.

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“At the end of the day, we have a lot of pigs that are counted coming on trucks and off trucks,” Mote notes. “And so, we ventured off a little bit, and we are able to add the counting technology.”

When moving pigs, some are bound to go back to where they came from. But with this personalized identification system through NUtrack, the system can account for pigs that might have backtracked into the pen.

Future research

The capabilities of this technology can span further than sickness detection and pig counting, even including estrus detection.

“With these cameras, we know that they should change their activity levels and behavior during the estrus time frame,” Mote explains.

When it comes time to utilize replacement females, this technology could be employed in selecting these females against lameness, for instance.

Mote says that European regulations against tail docking might make their way to the U.S. In collaboration with the University of Minnesota, his team is looking into preventative measures against tail-biting utilizing these cameras.

GLIMPSE INTO FUTURE: This snapshot of the NUtrack technology will give producers important information with 24/7 monitoring. (Courtesy of Benny Mote, UNL)

This research can lead to increased true feed efficiency. In genetic evaluations for replacement breeding animals, some animals with minimum fat might have been given too much credit for efficiency, as an example.

“Some of the data of the highly active pigs have the least amount of back fat because they are walking it off; versus just not eating and not putting it into fat,” Mote adds.

The NUtrack system is in the early phases of development, but the capabilities can range from health to efficiency to barn design and layouts. To learn more about the research happening with NUtrack, visit animalscience.unl.edu.