Recipient Organization
MICHIGAN STATE UNIV
(N/A)
EAST LANSING,MI 48824
Performing Department
ANIMAL SCIENCE
Non Technical Summary
The U.S. swine industry is being challenged to improve animal welfare while optimizing pig productivity, efficiently use inputs such as labor and feed, and train stockpeople to care for and handle pigs. Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) uses technology to help monitor and manage animals on farm and has the potential to simultaneously address these seemingly intractable challenges. However, PLF technology is not widely used on U.S. swine farms because two key questions have not yet been answered: (a) what technologies does the swine industry want and (b) how much will end users be willing to pay? Our overall project goal is to improve pig health and welfare by working with U.S. swine industry stakeholders (from conception to consumption), to understand perceptions, needs and barriers relative to PLF use on farms. Our interdisciplinary team of animal and social scientists, economists, veterinarians, and extension personnel will complete five objectives to meet this goal: 1) Develop an advisory board of stakeholders, pig farmers, and PLF technology developers to provide advice and share our findings with their cohorts; 2) Survey farmers and veterinarians to understand perceptions and needs for PLF to manage pigs; 3) Interview influencers across the US swine industry to examine perceptions and needs for PLF and the data PLF can generate; 4) Survey pig farmers and pork consumers to assess willingness to pay for PLF; and 5) share information with U.S. swine farmers and other members of the pork industry to encourage adoption of useful and usable precision livestock farming technology on US pig farms. We expect to learn about how farmers feel about using PLF technology to manage pigs as well as what they want from PLF and how much they can afford to pay for it. We will also learn about how other stakeholders in the swine industry view PLF and the data it generates and how they might use such information. We will also learn how consumers of pork view the use of PLF technology on farms to monitor and manage pigs and potentially improve their welfare--and whether this is worth paying more for pork. In the short-term, our findings can be used to help farmers make better decisions about what PLF to use on their farms and to open dialog between various groups within the swine industry surrounding the adoption of PLF on farms. Ultimately, knowledge we gain about PLF in the U.S. swine industry can be used to help develop technology that does help farmers manage their pigs more efficiently and humanely while providing information to other groups ranging from consumers to certification organizations that could additional transparency and accountability to pork production.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
100%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
Our over-arching goal is to work with U.S. swine industry stakeholders (from conception to consumption), to understand their perceptions, needs, and barriers relative to Precision Livestock Farming to improve adoption of useful PLF on swine farms through the following 5 objectives.Our interdisciplinary team of animal and welfare scientists, veterinarians, social scientists, economists and extension personnel will work with an industry-relevant advisory board composed of stakeholders, farmers and technology developers who will provide prospective and retrospective advice on our research and extension.We will survey farmers and veterinarians to understand their needs for PLF to manage pigs on farm and the drivers and constraints underlying their adoption of PLF.We will interview influential stakeholders across the swine industry to examine their perceptions of and needs for PLF and the data it generates for uses ranging from genetic improvement to welfare certification.We will survey farmers and consumers to assess their willingness-to-pay for PLF.We will convey this information back to farmers and influencers in the swine industry to facilitate development and adoption of useful and usable PLF on farms to improve welfare.
Project Methods
We propose to address the gap between PLF technology and the needs of end users in the swine industry.Objective 1: Create an active and industry-relevant advisory board composed of stakeholders, farmers and technology developers who will provide prospective and retrospective advice on our research and extension throughout the projectAdvisory Board establishment will be integral to this proposal in supporting the extension and research objectives and outcomes and will provide prospective and retrospective direction and input to the investigators throughout the project. The Advisory Board will be composed of representatives spanning the U.S. swine food chain (defined as conception to consumption) and have input from members engaged with PLF technology. The Advisory Board will elevate knowledge and disseminate information on PLF technology to U.S. swine farmers as a key tool to improve swine health, welfare and production. The advisory board will be committed to the active translation of information to farmers to support and communicate with U.S. swine farmers on the application and implementation of PLF technology on farm. The Board will consist of 12 members from three defined groups: producer, stakeholders, and technology. Each group will have an equal number of representatives. Selection of members who will serve on the Advisory Board is based on considerations of influence, geographic location and diversity.Objective 2: Survey farmers and veterinarians to understand their needs for PLF to manage pigs on farm and the drivers and constraints underlying their adoption of PLFWe will determine how well existing PLF solutions match industry needs for technological assistance, the state of awareness of these solutions and the factors likely to influence their adoption using quantitative surveys. Events in North Carolina, Iowa, and Michigan, which together represent 45% of U.S. pig inventory, will be used to achieve a minimum farmer sample size of 50 farmers and 20 veterinarians per state. Swine extension experts are embedded in the project in each state to ensure successful contact and interaction with respondents .Objective 3: Evaluate the utility of Precision Livestock Farming technology to key swine industry actors, including breeders, retailers and certification organizationsWe will conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals working for certification organizations, retailers, breeding companies and government agencies to gain a broader perspective of the potential ways PLF may be used or valued in the swine industry. The team has linkages with prominent welfare certification groups (e.g. Global Animal Partnership, Certified Humane), retailers (e.g. Natural Grocers, ALDI), breeding companies (e.g. The Maschoffs, Smithfield Premium Genetics, PIC), and organizations charged with enforcing laws related to animal welfare (e.g. the Michigan Department for Agriculture and Rural Development). Qualitative semi-structured interviews will be used to collect data from this group as they allow participants to freely define and raise topics for later discussion. This flexibility ensures that the aspects of PLF discussed are generated by the participants themselves, according to their perceptions and experiences of PLF. The semi-structured interview design involves creating an interview protocol detailing the key questions and topics to be covered but asks them in an open-ended questioning format. This design also allows use of questions broad enough to cover similar themes across the diverse stakeholder group (e.g., retailers, breeders, certification organizations). This enables comparisons, both across and within the different groups sampled, to be made during data analysis.Objective 4: Survey farmers and consumers to estimate willingness-to-pay for PLF then estimate cost-effectiveness of technology to improve pig welfare and productionTo estimate farmers' preferences and WTP, a discreet choice experiment will be used to quantify how farmers trade-off costs and benefits in health and welfare and labor and other financial costs. Following the strategy described above in Objective 2, we will use meetings in Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina to survey farmers (n>50/state, with no requirement or expectation that we will sample the same farmers). Farmers will be asked to choose between hypothetical PLF options that differ in four attributes: (1) investment cost, (2) on-going running cost, (3) improvement in a specified health or welfare outcome, and (4) benefit in growth. If they do not like any of the described strategies they can opt for the 'status quo' of keeping their current farm practice. The level of the attributes will be determined based on the knowledge gained in Objectives 1-3. The choice experiment will be designed using the software Ngene (ChoiceMetrics, 2018) to generate an efficient Bayesian design to result in data that generates parameter estimates with as small as possible standard errors.U.S. consumers' WTP for improved animal welfare associated with the use of PLF technologies will be estimated using choice data collected using an online choice experiment. WE will also quantify how they trade-off welfare attributes against other product characteristics. A sample of 3,000 pork consumers who are representative of the U.S. population in terms of gender, age, employment status, and state of residence will be asked to choose between hypothetical pork alternatives. Data will be used to (1) quantify consumers' WTP for improvement in pigs' welfare associated with the use of PLF technologies; (2) assess the drivers of consumers' WTP for animal-friendly pork; (3) investigate how consumers trade off the attribute animal welfare with other desirable pork attributes (e.g., "local", "organic", "low fat", and price); (4) assess whether the use of desirable labels along with the label "Animal Friendly", can foster the demand for animal-friendly pork; and (5) assess the heterogeneity of consumers' WTP and identify the segment of potential buyers of animal-friendly pork and profile them using their socio-demographic characteristics.A cost-benefit analysis will be carried out to assess the economic viability of implementing the PLF technologies shortlisted previously. The information on costs will draw on data from focus groups of farmers in Iowa, North Carolina and Michigan, representing the range of production systems in the U.S., who will be asked to estimate the installation and running costs of the shortlisted technologies. Estimated benefits will be determined from literature, manufacturer data, the focus group and Advisory Board, and consumers' WTP. Estimated costs and benefits will be compared against farmer WTP to identify if any of the PLF technologies would be acceptable to farmers without additional incentives (e.g., subsidies). We will test the robustness of this analysis by modifying benefits (e.g., increasing or decreasing estimated benefits in growth rate) and costs (e.g., sensitivity to changes in labor costs).Objective 5: Deliver extension programming and materials to swine farmers, advisors, suppliers and auditors to facilitate adoption of useful PLF to manage pig welfareWe will develop and deliver extension programming to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of PLF with the greatest perceived utility and feasibility for improving pig welfare on farm by leveraging information generated through Objectives 2-4. Our overall strategy is to sequentially employ 3 proven techniques that are foundational to Extension-based education: a) train-the-trainer, b) leverage extensive researcher-educator-farmer/producer networks built through years of close association, and c) continuous assessment to measure the success of the educational program.