WINNIPEG — Pig management will be radically different in a few years, but the nature of that difference is up to the creative people who invent it, predicts Iowa State University animal science professor Jason Ross.
“I think we’re going to be able to make data-driven decisions on the farm almost instantaneously,” said Ross in a presentation at the Manitoba Swine Seminar.
With artificial intelligence, genetic management, camera and sensor-based analytical systems and remote access to barns and experts, the people who find golden combinations of these systems will revolutionize the industry, Ross said. That revolution will come from experimenting in the hog industry.
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“What it’s going to look like is what the innovators in this room, and what the early adopters in this room, are going to make it look like,” said Ross.
Today’s fundamental production practices were once radical departures from accepted practices, but some people explored an issue and figured out ways that solutions could be applied.
Ross said the combination of basic scientific research, which explores the underlying biology, and applied research, which finds ways of using the understandings derived from basic research, leads to innovations.
“Most of the things we do right now were at one point basic scientific discoveries,” said Ross.
Part of the discovery process is challenging “dogma,” which is a set of assumptions and beliefs commonly shared and not usually questioned.
“Sometimes we assume things are true that are not so,” said Ross. “We do that all the time.”
It will take visionaries driven by intellectual curiosity and innovators who figure out ways to do things in a radically different way to devise the future hog industry made possible by new technologies. That’s how things have always improved in the hog industry.
“For all this progress, somebody had to think differently at some point,” said Ross.
