We have some clients who feed an incredible amount of byproducts from bakery meals to dog food — you name it. Whatever they can essentially get their hands on, they find a way to feed it. And so being able to, again, understand the economics, apply the biology of those things within a nutrition program and the cost of the ingredients that they’re pulling in, we customize it to those producers. We call our nutrition prescribed nutrition, right? Because it’s got to fit within the system. It’s not just the Carthage program, it’s our clients’ program. So tons of opportunities for those things. And then how does that lead into the importance of data? Data analytics is something that we have invested very heavily in here over the last five years at Carthage Veterinary Service. The industry has seen very few disruptive technologies over the years — artificial insemination, ractopamine, wean-to-finish production being a few examples — but it has been quite some time since we observed a new one. I truly believe that predictive and prescriptive analytics can be the next big disruptive technology for the industry. You can talk about artificial insemination being a truly disruptive technology, right? I mean, things like that have come along, and they’re usually few and far between. And I personally believe that data analytics, especially as we get into predictive and prescriptive analytics, is poised to be the next big disruptor in the industry. The industry is more at a point of descriptive analysis. What happened last month, what happened last week if we were lucky, we knew what happened yesterday, but typically, we were usually a week late. We’ve really tried to go to the next step of creating more of a business intelligence platform. We use Microsoft’s Power BI to build our analytics package, but with the adoption of handheld devices on the farm and being able to digitally input data instead of writing it on a piece of paper. Sending it to the office, the access to the data has become much more real-time. And so we’ve been able to utilize Power BI and that on-farm hardware, to really improve some of the real-time data reporting. So we have some data reports that they update four times a day. And so they’re as close to real-time as we’ve seen. With Power BI and just the capabilities of the visualization components of it, you can really create some true business intelligence reports that connect dots that don’t typically get connected in like the old KPI reports.
Recently we actually just hired a data scientist who just finished his Ph.D. in data science at the University of Missouri. His name’s Dr. Caleb Grohmann. We’re continuing to make those types of investments, so that our next steps are to get into the predictive analytics space. Our approach to it is that it has to be very practical. We can’t create black box algorithms that you really only create information that executive level leaders in a pig production business, can use. We have to create predictive algorithms that are going to assist decision-making at the slat level. That’s really what our current focus is moving towards so we can integrate those things into the programs and the data collection hardware that we already have on the farm, so we can use predictive analytics to assist a decision in real time at the farm, at the pig. So it’s extremely important. It’s always been important. It has just always been, we’ve always been so far behind on when we’ve actually been able to see the data and know what happened. But with the advances in technology, quite frankly, the expansion of the talent pool in data science, I think it’s a wide open frontier, and it’s one that we intend to participate in and, and continue to bring very innovative solutions to our clients. So Carthage emphasizes the holistic approach to swine production rather than self-optimizing individual parts. How do you ensure that all aspects of the production system work together to achieve optimal results? The first answer to that, Jim, is you make sure people are communicating. I think throughout my career, I’ve witnessed, and I’ve done it myself, sub-optimization within my particular area of expertise. So, you know, there’s the old saying that everything looks like a nail to a hammer, right? And so we at Carthage try to view ourselves as more of a shop, right, that has all the tools in it. And we bring the shop when we come to the farm. It’s human nature to an extent that if I’m a nutritionist, I’m going to think first and foremost about nutrition. If I’m a veterinarian, I usually think first and foremost about health. I’m a production management person, I think about people and executing processes. And the reality is all those things work in concert.
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