By Victor Lei and Lisette van der Zande
Most of the sows are housed in a cage system in the farrowing unit. Although this system is intended to reduce piglet mortality, it impacts the welfare of the sow as she is not able to express natural behavior in this system.
Therefore, Innova Canada has 360 free farrowing units to allow Topigs Norsvin for breeding high performing sows in the housing system of the future. Within the free farrowing units, we see natural differences in piglet survival between sows. We installed cameras above 40 free farrowing pens to record the behavior of sow and piglets. With these cameras, we develop machine learning models to automatically detect the sow and her piglets.
This allows us to monitor the behavior on a continuous scale in an objective manner. In the future, this could provide phenotypes that explain the natural difference in piglet survival, which would allow breeding for better sow performance in free farrowing systems.
