A three-dimensional camera system can help hog farmers decide which pigs to ship for processing.
“Instead of bringing the pigs to the scales, we bring the scales to the pigs,” says Francois Tellet of Cooperl, a group of companies that includes the maker of the reader system called OptiScan in Canada.
Why it matters: When individual pigs are grouped by weight, farmers can more easily hit the targets required by processors.
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The OptiScan was developed after 10 years of research and is manufactured and sold by the German company Hölscher + Leuschner, a member of the Cooperl group that markets European technology. Tellet showed the system to farmers at the recent Ontario Pork Congress.
An operator wears a vest with a built-in space for a computer tablet, so they can see it without holding it. A three-dimensional camera reader is attached by a cord to the tablet. The operator holds the reader over a pen of finisher pigs and the software estimates the weight of each pig from 110 to 300 pounds. Tellet says an experienced operator can estimate the weight of 120 to 150 pigs per hour.
Sorters with scales work well on farms with large pens and infrastructure to sort pigs based on weight. The camera system works well on farms with smaller pens of 20 to 50 pigs. Morning is the best time to scan, when the pigs are quiet, says Tellet.
The ability to match packer’s grids pays off for farmers, he added, and if a farm ships 10,000 pigs per year, the company’s analysis shows that the camera-weight system will pay for itself in nine to 15 months.
“You can choose your maximum weight where you can make money,” he says.
The payback comes not only from hitting the grid, but also by saving labour and feed costs because pigs are shipped at the optimum time.
According to Hölscher + Leuschner, the OptiScan can also be used to determine feed volumes for a pen of pigs once the weights are known for that pen. The system will work on any breed of pig.
