The Pig Development Department at Teagasc Moorepark secured funding from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) as part of the US-Ireland R&D Partnership Programme to use Artificial intelligence (AI) for improving piglet survival rates by monitoring feeding patterns and enhancing husbandry practices. Newborn piglets face a range of challenges at birth; their low body fat reserves places them in danger of chilling, their small size compared to the mother places them in danger of being crushed, the large number of newborns in a litter relative to the number of teats places them at risk of starvation. Many of these problems are exacerbated by genetic selection for hyper prolific sows; larger litters are associated with lower individual piglet birthweights and greater weight variation within the litter which is a risk for piglet survival. These problems contribute to high pre-weaning piglet mortality which poses economic, animal welfare and ethical concerns.
Dr Edgar Garcia Manzanilla and Dr Laura Boyle from the Pig Development Department at Teagasc and a cross-disciplinary, multi-institution research team are using artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand piglet feeding patterns. Their goal is to develop solutions to reduce pre-weaning mortality, improve production efficiency, and ensure piglet welfare.
“This is an exciting project particularly as it will allow us to protect piglet welfare in the less-confined farrowing and lactating conditions that offer welfare improvements to sows. Such free-farrowing and free-lactation systems are demanded by society and will likely be required under EU legislation in the future”, says Dr Boyle.
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) awarded Teagasc funding for four years for the proposal “IDEAS Tripartite: Automated Piglet and Sow Monitoring for Early Detection of At-Risk Piglets”.
This project is one of 11 selected for the Inter-Disciplinary Engagement in Animal Systems (IDEAS) program, which supports integrated research and outreach projects focused on precision animal management, the environmental impacts of animal production, and the societal aspects of animal welfare.
The primary goal is to generate robust data to inform sow and piglet husbandry practices and contribute to research in areas such as nutrition science, breeding, lactation biology, applied ethology and animal sciences, including welfare, genetics and genomics.
A Tripartite Team, Cascading Knowledge
This international team, or tripartite, led by Dr Madonna Benjamin of Michigan State University College of Veterinary Medicine, is made up of research leaders from North America, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, specialising in computer vision, data-driven technologies, sustainable animal production, global food security, farm animal behaviour and welfare, and piglet and sow nutrition. With research sites in three countries, the team will collect data from farms using diverse husbandry methods, including free-lactation pens.
The IDEAS Tripartite: Automated Piglet and Sow Monitoring for Early Detection of At-Risk Piglets team also includes: Drs’ Llias Kyriazakis and Niall McLaughlin from Queen’s University Belfast; Dr Ramon Muns from the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in Belfast; Drs’ Monique Pairis-Garcia, Mark Knauer, and Eduardo Beltranena from North Carolina State University; Dr Tami Brown-Brandl from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Dr Russ Hovey from the University of California, Davis; Dr Chantal Farmer from the Sherbrooke Research and Development Centre of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and Drs’ Beth Ferry and Daniel Morris from Michigan State University.
“Our goal is to capture a ground truth on piglet nursing that will inform not only our own research but also provide a resource for researchers in other disciplines,” says Dr Benjamin. “Through the engineering expertise of Drs’ Daniel Morris, Niall McLaughlin, and Tami Brown-Brandl, our computer vision capture systems will see nuances that human eyes can’t—each camera will focus on one sow and her piglets 24 hours a day without the distraction of other tasks.”
This work is supported by grant no. 2024-68014-42559 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Rural Affairs as part of the US-Ireland Research and Development Partnership.