How about listening to the sounds disrupting farms worldwide?

 

Sensors, cameras, microphones… This sounds like a Big Brother for animals. What can farmers and vets achieve through Precision Livestock Farming?
Animal welfare and sustainability are key in this whole process. Exactly like humans, animals have their welfare closely connected to their immune system. Stress levels are very important for livestock. The happier the animals, the less stress they will have and the energy in their bodies will not be needed to fight sickness. For example, exactly like us, their organism work to keep their body temperature constant, and their metabolic energy comes from the feed. By closely monitoring any signal of stress or distress in their immune systems, farmers and vets can intervene in advance, improve welfare and even save an animal’s life. Knowing all that, producers can also improve management; adapt feed, water and even electrical supplies, preserving resources and avoiding unnecessary waste. Through PLF you can significantly contribute to reducing environmental pressure by increasing the efficiency in using feed energy. In other words, less feed should generate more animal products. This is efficiency.

What does it mean for us? End meat consumers?
First, it means better quality meat, produced with the highest animal welfare and health standards. PLF gives more transparency to the community. Technology is available not only to help animals, but all stakeholders: the farmers, the retailers, the slaughterhouses, the feed producers and the consumers, who can know exactly where their protein comes from and how that protein was handled.

 

Your research has a strong focus on poultry and swine. Why?
Well, those are fundamental in livestock. Although you have more broiler meat than pork and new trends arising, like the consumption of insects, pigs play a significant role. At the moment, the technology cost is still too high for broilers, but not for pigs, mainly considering the potential of sound. Today camera technology for broilers is under development, but sound analyses will be cheaper to monitor such a high number of animals.  Using these technologies allied with a solid product portfolio like Boehringer Ingelheim’s changes everything.
 

So, why is sound so promising?
Like humans, it is all about communication. Most animals live in groups. Just by listening to a group or a herd, you can pick up several signs of behavior such as language, aggression, illness or infections. That way, you receive a lot of relevant information to determine the current health and welfare status of the community. Furthermore, it has technical advantages. Microphones capture the sound independently of local environmental conditions, like temperature, humidity, dust, etc. It works in the dark, for instance. If you compare to cameras, these advantages are even clearer. Cameras are challenging, as keeping their lenses clean is no easy task. If you think of sensors, they also bring disadvantages due to need of frequently recharging. Sound is a very elegant technique able to provide valuable data.

Having an academic background, how do you see the collaboration of companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim in further developing PLF? Which role do they play?
Creating academic and industrial partnerships is very important, because universities develop knowledge while companies develop technologies and manage processes in the field. Unfortunately, many professors build careers based only on scientific publications, worried only about citation index and their scientific impact factor, totally disregarding the need of bringing needed innovative products to the market. Universities have knowledge; industry has processes. This means that collaborations are vital to ally the best science with the best processes, generating the best products capable of really changing the lives of humans and animals. This is the real impact factor for a scientist: when he sees people using his knowledge in the field. The example of Boehringer Ingelheim, as a worldwide market player, intensively collaborating with a young high-tech company like SoundTalks, has a huge potential for creating a real impact by bringing disruptive technology.  
 

Livestock is traditionally a conservative sector. Do you see resistances to digitalization?
Yes, unfortunately there are some wrong perceptions. The first is a certain fear that machines will replace people, which is not true.  Look at human pharma, for instance. Technology did not suppress physicians; it gave them better means to understand disease, collect and analyze data, enabling a better set of treatments. The same applies to animal health and precision livestock farming. Technology is helping farmers and veterinarians work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions, but there is still a lot of confusion in this field.
 

Confusion? What do you mean?
Well, much of what is currently offered in the market is not validated scientifically. There are a lot of new apps and gadgets promising results that they cannot deliver because they do not have the accurate tools to. For the customer, these options might seem modern and tempting at first sight, but the truth is that, usually, these companies cannot deliver what they promise. I would say 95 percent of these products are rubbish. That brings insecurity and a lot of confusion to the market.
 

If you could predict the future, what would PLF look like in 10 years?
I am convinced that at a certain point we will come to sensors on the animals. In the near future, though, sound is the biggest field to explore, and we have only started to discover its potential. Often these days, a sow has many more piglets that it can feed. Sounds can anticipate such a situation and allow reactions in a timely manner. For instance, the hunger, the calling, the communication between sows and piglets. Understanding the language of animals is definitely a game-changer. Not only does it bring a lot in terms of crucial information and animal welfare, but it is a technology that will become more and more available to small producers once big industrial producers start buying it. So far, the facts have shown that the price of technology mainly depends on numbers produced.  Prices for high-quality products such as Boehringer Ingelheim’s SoundTalks will fall dramatically, and this is great news. This is something that will add a lot of value to farmers, veterinarians and several other stakeholders, including consumers. Their ability to make much faster and better decisions will make the market look much different in the coming five years.