A Senior Strategic Advisor with Maximus Systems says real time analysis of data is allowing pork producers to make much more effective use of that data.
“Big Data and Technology” was discussed last week as part of the 2019 Banff Pork Seminar.
Dr. Tom Stein, a Senior Strategic Advisor with Maximus Systems, says in the past data analysis provided a retrospective picture where as today everything is looking forward at what happening today and what’s predicted to happen tomorrow or next week.
We’re moving into a world where the data is being collected on the farm, in the barn and some of it is active where people are actually entering the data manually into iPads or tablets or their smart phones and some of it, in fact more of it now, is being collected automatically, passively. Data coming from the controls, the temperature, the humidity, other environmental information, also feed information coming from feed mills automatically digitally, processor information coming automatically.
So we’re moving rapidly into this world of real time data. The reason that becomes important is that, like in sow farms you move to daily targets instead of weekly or monthly. You’re much closer, much more connected to what’s happening each day, earlier intervention. The idea is to try to reduce the variability in the financial results.
~ Dr. Tom Stein, Maximus Systems
Dr. Stein says the old way of doing things was you would write down the data on paper and someone would the enter the data, resulting in a two week lag, where as today data can be analyzed in real time. He says this new way of taking large quantities of data and applying statistical techniques to it to build predictive algorithms is going to permeate everything.
