I think when we think about some of the stuff that has had a pretty big impact on our business over the last five years, getting digital devices into the sow farms has been a pretty big game-changer. We weren’t the first to do it by any means, but the Carthage System and a lot of our clients are now at that point, and a lot of the farms, every one of the employees on the farm has some kind of digital device with them all day long. And so the first thing that was created was the opportunity to have real-time data and real-time metrics and monitoring of performance on a daily basis. But that has quickly continued to evolve into utilizing programs like PigFlow. We can now direct the work of the people on the farm utilizing the handheld and the ability to just communicate. When you’re on a 6,000-sow farm, there’s a lot of ground to cover to get around and talk to everyone. And so just being able to communicate has been a bit of a game-changer. It all sounds really simple in the context of the outside world, if you will, because we’ve all had cell phones for so long. But getting past that, and getting Wi-Fi into the barns will continue to create opportunities for technology to rapidly advance. It will continue to create data visibility. When you look at that data that the new piece of technology is creating in a vacuum, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. It tells you part of it. And usually that is, it’s valuable. One of the things that we’re working very hard on is data integration. We have data that comes at us from multiple places, often through disparate information collection platforms. And being able to integrate all of that together into a common transcribed database that relates it all to the right farm or the right pig or whatever it is, it’s a fairly monumental task. And so that’s something, we have a couple of database developers on staff here, that that’s what they work on. That is where I think these types of technologies are really going to continue to change the game. When we can look at the environmental monitoring in the context of real-time, accurate feed disappearance and water disappearance and hopefully someday, the weights of the pigs in the barn that’s being measured by a camera system, now we start to get a holistic picture and we can really make some precision management type decisions with it. But that’s got to get integrated.
I think that is a piece of technology that isn’t quite there yet in the industry. And something that we’re working on and collaborating with people to continue to make that better.
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