Livestock farming 4.0 is already a reality. Thanks to the use of technology on farms, farmers can collect a large amount of information and implement actions to improve profitability, production, animal welfare and environmental sustainability.
New technologies are not the only ones that have reached agriculture . Although more slowly, automation has also made its way into livestock farms. Automatic milking robots, pigs with chips, devices to monitor the movement and behaviour of animals and drones to monitor grazing are some of the technological advances that can be found on farms throughout Spain.
Rabbit farming 4.0
In Valladolid, the Hermi Group, market leader in rabbit meat, has revolutionised rabbit farming with an app that allows rabbit breeders to exchange information in real time. The application, which is already implemented in the 50 integrated farms - 35 in Castilla y León, 10 in Castilla-La Mancha, 3 in Galicia, 1 in Cantabria and another in the Basque Country - represents more than 70 thousand breeding sows.
The application allows for daily collection of farm student data production data, management of feed orders and monitoring of consumption with the aim of improving farm productivity.
“In a very intuitive way, the farmer enters what happens each day through the application, and the data is on our servers online, although if for any reason there is no internet connection, it can operate normally, and the information will be transferred when the mobile phone has coverage. Without a doubt, it has meant a true revolution in rabbit farming, because it has allowed us to start what we have called rabbit farming 4.0,” says Santiago Miguel Casado, CEO of Grupo Hermi , with whom we had the opportunity to speak.
The implementation of the app on these farms, most of which are new, has meant an induced investment of just over 20 million euros and the creation of more than 90 jobs in rural areas, of which just under 50% are female jobs.
Efficiency and profitability
Thanks to this application, developed and implemented by the Group, a technological tool has been created that can be used in any livestock sector for meat production. Thus, he explains that “having data that can be transformed into information, and this into knowledge, allows us to undertake continuous improvement that, without a doubt, results in greater efficiency and profitability for our farms.”
As Santiago Miguel Casado tells us, even before developing the app, the first thing they did, together with the technicians, was to define the indicators they wanted to measure, what data and when they had to be recorded by the farmer. “With this, we can find out about fertility, prolificacy, animal growth, losses per cycle, etc. In short, all the data that, in some way, tells us the level of well-being of our rabbits.”