Animal Farm given a hi-tech make-over

Chinese firms push facial and voice recognition to make some pigs more equal than others

CHINESE companies are pushing facial and voice recognition and other advanced technologies as ways to protect the country’s pigs.

In this Year of the Pig, many Chinese hogs are dying from a deadly swine disease, threatening the country’s supply of pork, a staple of Chinese dinner tables.

So China’s ebullient technology sector is applying the same techniques it has used to transform Chinese life – and, more darkly, that the Chinese government increasingly uses to spy on its own people – to make sure its pigs are in the pink of health.

“If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick,” said Jackson He, chief executive of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a “future pig farm” with facial- and voicerecognition technologies.

China’s biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and Jd.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs’ faces. Alibaba also uses voicerecognition software to monitor their coughs. Many in China are quick to embrace high-tech solutions to just about any problem.

A digital revolution has transformed China into a place where nearly anything – financial services, spicy takeaways, manicures and dog grooming, to name a few – can be summoned with a smartphone. Facial recognition has been deployed in public bathrooms to dispense toilet paper, in train stations to apprehend criminals and in housing complexes to open doors.

This pig push, however, may be a step too soon. “I like the idea, I like the concept, but I need to be shown that it works,” said Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at the City University of Hong Kong. “Because if it doesn’t work, it’s counter-productive.”

Facial recognition won’t help unless China has a comprehensive database of pig faces to track their movement, he pointed out. Also, facial recognition doesn’t help “once the animal is in the slaughterhouse and they chop it into bits.”

“How then can you connect the head to the rest of the carcass?” Pfeiffer asked.

Many of China’s pig farmers are also sceptical. China is in the midst of closing and consolidating many of its small pig farms, blaming them for polluting the environment. But there are still 26 million small pig farms in the country, representing about half the number of farms, according to the agriculture ministry and experts.

“We will not choose to invest in these things,” said Wang Wenjun, a 27-year-old farmer who won a modest amount of fame after he uploaded videos of himself singing to his hogs.

“Unless it’s a large-scale pig farm, farms that have just over a couple hundred pigs will not find a use for it.”

Broadly, the Chinese government in recent years has endorsed technology on the farm. Its most recent five-year plan, a major economic planning document, calls for increased use of robotics and network technology. In October, the State Council, or China’s Cabinet, said it wanted to promote “intelligent farming” and the application of information technology in agriculture. In August, Beijing city agricultural officials praised “raising pigs in a smart way” using the A-B-C-DS: artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing and data technology.

So when African swine fever swept through China’s farms, the country’s technology companies saw an opportunity. The disease has no known vaccine or cure. It can spread through contact between animals or through infected pig products, meaning it can lurk for months in sausages or ham. It doesn’t affect humans, but they can carry it. China has culled nearly 1 million pigs, set up roadblocks and built fences, to no avail.

There is a lot at stake. China is the world’s largest pig breeder, with a current population of about 400 million, and its largest pork consumer. The meat is so important that the country has its own strategic pork reserve in the event of a shortage.

The disease could also ripple across borders. It has been found in sausages transported by Chinese tourists in Australia, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand, stoking fears that it could end up in the US. A prolonged outbreak could cause prices to rise globally.

Government rules to fight the swine fever prevent outsiders from visiting pig farms to see the technology in action, so claims by the companies couldn’t be independently verified. Local media and the companies said several big farms use the systems.

The companies backing the technology say they can help farmers isolate disease carriers, reduce the cost of feed, increase the fertility of sows and reduce unnatural deaths. Jd.com’s system uses robots to feed pigs the correct amount of food depending on the animals’ stage of growth. Smartahc, a company that uses AI to monitor pigs’ vital statistics and offers commercially available services, hooks up sows with wearable monitors that can predict the pigs’ ovulation time. |

Dirk Pfeiffer