Protein Producers Winter 2016

Can Thinking Like an Engineer Improve Health Management?

By: Dr. Jim Lowe, Production Animal Consultation Big data is all around us. The world of agriculture is embracing cutting-edge technologies at a rapid pace to improve agricultural practices and collect large amounts of data. It is easy to get lost in the cloud computing, new gadgets, algorithms and correlation analysis, foregoing the real mission of optimizing the technology to enhance real pig farming.

Today, tools used for disease management are complicated and highly integrated with lots of moving parts with biological, operational and human behavior variations.

However, it is how we incorporate these tools all together and leverage the big data along with complex models in an appropriate manner that will move disease management forward.

The challenge at hand in modern agriculture is how to drive execution at the individual farm and also on a large scale. So, how do you do something 100 times over in a large geographic area to really make an impact?

Managing persistent diseases, such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, is frustrating for veterinarians and producers, so improved management strategies are a priority and based on the lack of past success, should cause us to rethink current practices. Creating a new path that allows us to optimize sophisticated models and big data for better disease management is about thinking differently.

Producers and animal health stakeholders can take a lesson from an engineer’s playbook and execute their threestep process — measure, model and fix.

Measure: The first step is to find the voice of the system. You have to understand what goes into the system and what comes out of the system. You have to figure out what the system is doing.

Model: Understanding how all the working parts fit together is the next step. It is important to model it mathematically or physically to understand and try potential interventions.

Fix: Finally, the last step is to integrate the solution to solve the problem. Often in animal agriculture production, we just forego the first two steps. As a practitioner, I am really good at this bucket – let’s just go fix it today.

We tend to think more about fix it than how to measure and model those solutions and that leads to less than optimal solutions. pacdvms.com 27