Published on June 20, 2017
The value of sharing
Better breeding today for a brighter life tomorrow means collaborating on a higher level with the animal protein chain partners to solve issues that make the entire chain more sustainable. We were asked, as partner of the Agrivision FarmHack Hackathon organized by Nutreco, to share data of our swine breeding program. All to tackle the issue on sharing data equally.
The following challenge was presented: “You don’t know the value of sharing if you don’t share. And you don’t know if sharing is worthwhile, because the value is unknown.” Invitees of the event got to join teams working on this challenge. The teams had graphical designers, data scientists, industry experts and software engineers working together.
It’s amazing to see what the different teams accomplished in a relatively short time. By sharing data all stakeholders can create a different (over)view. While combining the different datasets and sources, innovation in new interesting fields is waiting to happen.
We supplied fertility data from our swine breeding program. I was interested to see the value out of sharing data between different parts of the pork value chain to improve better breeding today for a brighter life tomorrow.”
The biggest challenge is to have stakeholders in the value chain understanding that sharing data leads to a more efficient chain, although it is not necessarily their part that benefits most.
“Through collaborating and sharing with people from different backgrounds and companies, it is possible to try and find new areas and solutions to help our customers become more sustainable and increase total system profitability.”
Bram Visser, Geneticist Research and Technology Center Hendrix Genetics, was part of the winning team. They won with their Swine Smarts solution. Creating an app that combines data from different sources. The value generated by sharing data equally for example leads to warning farmers that animals eat too much, get too fat and in the end do not hit the grid at the slaughter payout.
“To make sharing simple, quick and secure for the swine growers we created an app. We can breed better today by investigating collaborations between different links in the value chain, using existing standards such as OADA to make our data sharing lives easier.”
