How did these Internet companies raise pigs in the past year? Is pig face recognition a gimmick? Does artificial intelligence technology improve production efficiency? How much do farmers accept "artificial intelligence (AI) to raise pigs"?
Recently, the reporter walked into Jilin Jingqishen Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd., a private pig-raising enterprise, to understand the story behind "artificial intelligence (AI) pig-raising".
Jilin Jingqishen Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd. was established in 199 1. It is a private pig-raising enterprise, which has been breeding wild black pigs for 28 years, and its products are provided to Wal-Mart Sam Store, Carrefour, AEON, China Resources Ole and JD.COM 7 Fresh. Sun Yanchun, the 40-year-old CEO, has a new idea after following in his father's footsteps. In addition to actively introducing mechanized equipment to improve efficiency, can he introduce more intelligent means to raise pigs and improve management processes?
For example, a problem in raising pigs is how to count the exact number of tens of millions of piglets and how to identify each pig. In the past, the practice was to give pigs ear defects-if you encounter diseases or fertility of pigs, you can record them through ear defects.
From the layman's point of view, the "missing child" on the ear may be the shape of the pig's ear itself. An expert can tell which batch this pig belongs to and what it has experienced at the first touch. However, if the technology of "pig face recognition" can be developed, and all kinds of information such as pig's food intake, body temperature change and exercise can be recorded by intelligent means, and all kinds of information can be recorded in the cloud, will it be more convenient for each pig to have its own file, thus reducing labor costs?
Furthermore, judging from the management process of pig farms, if employees can be motivated by the power of machines, can the work efficiency be greatly improved?
"The progress of these technologies is logically simple, but traditional enterprises like us can't do research and development in this area. Therefore, we urgently need this demand, and we need some high-tech enterprises and enterprises with resource integration capabilities to do this. " Sun Yanchun said.
Using artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies bred in the field of Internet to empower more traditional industries, help them to carry out digital transformation and upgrading, and improve operational efficiency, it is called industrial Internet in Tencent, industrial digital interconnection in Alibaba, and industrial digitalization in JD.COM. In the field of agriculture, technology companies have also begun to flood in.
13 On June 38, Li Jialong, deputy general manager of JD.COM Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, told the media that the initial development of pig face recognition technology was not part of the current "intelligent solution for animal husbandry", but for the needs of the insurance team in JD.COM.
"This is a long story. We started to do facial recognition of pigs, because we insured pigs in JD.COM Insurance Company. About 100 pigs were raised, and 10 pigs were saved. (But) I can apply for insurance no matter who dies, because the insurance company doesn't know which ten of your 100 pigs are insured by me, so I can apply for insurance even if more than 90 other pigs die. We had an insurance team in JD.COM at that time, and we really wanted to identify these ten pigs by a means, so we began to study the technology of pig face recognition on 20 17. "
As a result, this group of technicians plunged into the pig farm. "From September 20 17, we often went to pig farms to collect data and understand the current situation of animal husbandry in China, so we started to do farming and animal husbandry in JD.COM Mall."
China is a big aquaculture country in the world, with the number of live pigs ranking first in the world and pork production accounting for about half of the world. However, there is still a certain gap between the labor productivity, feed conversion rate, sow productivity and production cost of pig breeding and the international advanced level.
From the perspective of breeding cost, "this is the data of 20 17. Our cost per kilogram of pork is about 7.82 yuan, while that in the United States is only 3.97 yuan. "