Technology is providing increasingly available ways to both assess variation and to respond to it. If you don’t hang around the crop guys very much you may not know that they now have at their disposal some remarkable ways to respond to variation in soil type, elevation and drainage issues when planting and harvesting fields.
GPS systems coupled with satellite photos, soil maps and elevation map layers are providing the modern cropping system with a means to deliver a more ideal seed density, fertilization rate and treatment distribution as well as capture yield monitoring data dynamically as fields are planted, tilled and harvested. These systems allow the producer to automatically distribute fertilizer for instance in an infinitely variable dose to fields based on the crop planted, the previous crop planted, the soil type and the elevation of the land being driven over. Delivery nozzles are calibrated on the fly in response to GPS location and layers of related maps.
Once the season is complete, yield monitoring gives the results in a similarly complex array of outcomes mapped to the same grid to update these intelligent systems for next time. This kind of system is providing tremendous ability to mitigate the waste involved in providing average input levels to whole fields that have dozens of different characteristics.
Swine systems are emerging which help do similar things. Electronic Sow Feeding (ESF) systems being installed in pen gestation systems allow the producer to individually tailor daily feed delivered to individual sows which are monitored via an ear tag read as the sow approaches the feeding station. Small augurs at the trough dose out the predetermined amount of feed which is allowing producers the ability to correct sow conditioning problems and to discover animals which are not eating electronically. These methods provide a near real-time way to intervene and stop escalating variation before it has a chance to do as much damage to the system.
Similar electronic devices are available to monitor temperature, ventilation, propane use, fan time, wean-to-finish feed use, water intake and daily weights of individual animals. Though most of these weighing technologies do not identify the weight to an individual animal, yet they give the individual weight distribution in the barn with a method to automatically sort out pigs which have reached target weights. Programmed in the technology will be an expected or predicted use of these inputs or achieved target weights so that a variance to expectation can be daily monitored and action taken early to avert waste, disease progression and an every expanding variance of outcome. The future is arriving fast. It is not hard to see that effective mitigation of variance will define the next major leap in competitive advantage.
