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Wen 丨 Jiang Yuxuan
Editor丨Jiang Yuxuan
«——[·Preface·] ——»
Body temperature is an important physiological indicator in the whole process of pig rearing, and it is also an effective means to assist disease diagnosis and pig health monitoring.
In the past, contact methods were often used to measure rectal temperature using columns of mercury, but this method was complex and labor-intensive.
Not only that, contact temperature measurement is easy to cause the stress response of pigs, which is not conducive to their healthy growth, due to the increasing demand for large-scale pig farming in mainland welfare agriculture, traditional rectal temperature measurement can no longer meet the requirements.
In recent years, new pig body temperature detection technology has emerged, including electronic body temperature detection technology and infrared temperature measurement technology.
Infrared temperature measurement technology has become the main means of measuring the temperature of pig body surface due to its advantages of non-contact, long distance and real-time, especially infrared image processing technology.
In the field of pig breeding is still in the exploratory stage, the pig industry has widely used point-by-point analytical infrared temperature measurement equipment represented by infrared thermometers, and full-field analytical infrared temperature measurement equipment represented by infrared thermal imagers.
Brief introduction
The mainland pig industry has always been the main force of the livestock and poultry breeding industry, and in recent years, mainland pork production ranks first in the world, accounting for about half of the world's total output.
With 700 million pigs slaughtered each year and pork production accounting for about 64% of total meat production, the pork industry plays an important role in China's meat industry.
Although pigs occupy an important position in the livestock and poultry industry, the mainland pig industry still lags behind.
The pig industry is mainly composed of scattered farmers, with a relatively low degree of industrialization and modernization, and as of 2016, pigs with a size of less than 500 pigs accounted for about 55% of the pork production in the market.
More than half of the pig farms have problems such as poor breeding environment, backward technology, frequent diseases, feed self-allocation and management chaos, and these informal pig breeding models lead to serious waste of resources and increase risks in the pig breeding process.
It is urgent to upgrade the pig breeding industry from a decentralized breeding model to an intensive modern industry, and it is necessary to promote the upgrading of the pig breeding industry more urgently to solve environmental and technical problems.
This can not only reduce the waste of resources, but also effectively control the occurrence of swine diseases and reduce the risks in the process of pig raising.
In recent years, the concept of welfare breeding has attracted more and more attention from the pig industry, and the health problems of pigs have also attracted much attention.
Due to a series of problems in the resource management of pig breeding enterprises, such as poor pig houses, poor breeding environment, and irregular breeding technology, these problems generally exist in free-range farmers or small-scale pig farms.
The effective prevention and diagnosis of swine diseases is still an urgent problem, and timely access to body temperature data can help early warning and diagnose pig diseases, which is of great significance for the stable and healthy development of pig breeding enterprises and can also promote the development of welfare breeding concepts.
With the advancement of urbanization construction and the demand for environmental protection in the mainland, the pig breeding mode has begun to accelerate the transformation from individual decentralized breeding to large-scale breeding, and the pig breeding industry is ushering in a new development trend.
The advancement of the Internet of Things in agriculture has made it possible to sense pig temperature information in real time.
With the continuous expansion of breeding scale and the promotion of industrialized and intensive breeding mode, the problem of environmental pollution in pig houses has become increasingly prominent.
Serious environmental pollution will have a series of impacts on the growth and development and reproduction of pigs, and the deterioration of the pig breeding environment makes the health problems of pigs increasingly serious.
In high-density breeding environments, where diseases and outbreaks are frequent, real-time monitoring of pig body temperature is essential to keep track of pig health.
The prevention and diagnosis of swine diseases has become the key task of intensive breeding.
The significance of measuring pig body temperature
Temperature regulation is one of the most important mechanisms to maintain the homeostasis of the whole organism, body temperature refers to the temperature of the deep part of the animal's body, which is an objective reflection of the animal's activity state in the body, and is also an important physiological signal reflecting the health status of pigs.
Changes in pig body temperature can reflect changes in their health status in time, and if pig body temperature fluctuates greatly, it may be due to the interference of physiological factors, and may also indicate the occurrence of certain diseases, especially infectious diseases in the incubation period.
Body temperature information is very helpful for the diagnosis and treatment of animal diseases, helping to detect sick animals early, explore the extent of the disease, determine the severity of the disease, etc.
The change of sow body temperature is also very important to judge whether the sow is in heat, the accurate identification of sow estrus is very important for pig production, by measuring body temperature to accurately identify sows in heat, timely breeding can be achieved, thereby improving the sow fertility rate.
Real-time control of the temperature changes of pregnant sows also helps to monitor the health of sows, and the relevant breeding work can be reasonably arranged according to the body temperature, so as to improve the farrowing rate of sows.
With the development of agricultural Internet of Things technology, timely and real-time acquisition of pig body temperature data has become a reality. Real-time collection of pig temperature information also helps to monitor the health of pigs.
For herd pigs, if abnormal pigs with infectious diseases can be detected early, the epidemic can be controlled in time and economic losses can be reduced. Real-time acquisition of pig temperature information has become an important part of pig farming.
In the actual pig raising process, the rectal temperature is generally used to represent the body temperature of pigs, and the body temperature range of healthy pigs is 38~40 °C, and there may be certain differences between different breeds of pigs. During the feeding process, there are many reasons why pigs have an abnormally high fever. These abnormally high fever disorders are collectively referred to as "hyperthermia."
Clinically, 80% of cases are mainly fever, mainly viral hyperthermia, and some are bacterial hyperthermia. A sudden rise in body temperature above 40°C in pigs is usually an early warning sign of certain diseases.
Pigs often have other complications when they get sick. Depending on the pig's complications and body temperature, diseases in pigs can be effectively diagnosed. In the breeding process, the abnormal changes in pig body temperature should be paid attention to in real time, and the disease should be strictly diagnosed in combination with high temperature complications, and the disease should be prescribed.
Traditional methods of measuring pig body temperature are manual. The mercury column is lubricated before measurement, then hold one end of the thermometer with a string of about 15 cm and clamp it to the other end of the string.
When measuring, insert a column of mercury into the pig's anus and fix the hair above the pig's tail with an iron clip. Remove the thermometer after 5 min, wipe the mercury column and read the data. Pigs with different temperaments need to be comforted before measurement to reduce the strong stress of the pigs so as not to affect their healthy growth.
The advantage of manually measuring the rectal temperature of pigs is that the rectal temperature obtained without stress in pigs accurately reflects the body temperature information of pigs. In contact manual measurements, pigs tend to develop a strong stress response, which leads to a rapid increase in rectal temperature, affecting measurement accuracy (Godyn and Herbu, 2017).
This method requires 2-3 workers and takes about 6 minutes to complete a measurement. In large-scale farming, this consumes a lot of labor. During contact measurement, there is also a risk of disease crossing and contact between humans and animals. The pig farming industry needs a more scientific and efficient way to obtain pig body temperature, and technology based on remote measurement is one of the most in-demand technologies.
Emerging methods for measuring body temperature in livestock and poultry
Using radio frequency technology and contact temperature sensing technology, a system for automatically obtaining the body surface temperature of dairy cows was developed, which realized 24-hour automatic monitoring of cow body surface temperature.
Through the statistical analysis and balance processing of the data, the correction formula of the cow's body surface temperature was obtained, so as to obtain the daily change of the cow's body surface temperature, and accumulated experience for scientific measurement of cow body temperature.
This technology can be applied not only to cows, but also to furbearers. After the bourg anesthesia was taken, the tracheal temperature was measured using a thermometric trachea with 3 probes inserted into the porcine respiratory tract, and the results showed that the measured temperature was almost the same as the lung tracheal temperature.
There is also the use of implantation of thermometry electronic estrus chip, the chip is inserted into the left side of the sow's neck to obtain the subcutaneous temperature, and the mercury column thermometer is used as a reference to obtain the rectal temperature.
Studies have found an association between changes in body temperature and estrus behavior, with sows first increasing and then decreasing before and after estrus, and then returning to normal, so it is recommended to judge pregnancy status based on changes in sow temperature.
There is also the use of capsule-type wireless sensors implanted in the neck of piglets, resulting in capsules that are consistent with manual measurement of rectal temperature but require surgical injection of piglets. Using ear tag temperature sensors to measure ear temperature in pigs, studies have found circadian rhythms in ear skin temperature, with the highest at night and lowest in the afternoon, and the relationship between ear temperature and the intensity of behavioral activity has been studied.
These studies provide useful information for understanding issues such as temperature regulation and energy conversion in pigs. The development of these technologies provides a more scientific and efficient way for animal temperature monitoring, and has a wide application prospect in the breeding industry and scientific research.
The implantable temperature measuring device only needs to be implanted once in the livestock and poultry body, which can indeed reduce the stress response of the livestock and poultry during the measurement process and facilitate subsequent experimental measurement. When the device is first implanted into the target to be measured, the animal needs to be anesthetized before implantation.
There are some disadvantages to this method, mainly related to the necessity of fixing the animal. The operation process is easy to cause harm to the animal and reduce the welfare level of the animal. Electronic implantable and fixed temperature measuring devices often need to be recalibrated after a period of use, and the operation process is more complicated.
Godin et al. compared invasive and noninvasive measurement techniques, analyzed various continuous temperature measurements in pig studies, and pointed out the advantages and limitations of each method.
Invasive measurement techniques are tactile, such as the use of a rectal thermometer to measure temperature, and in addition to the pressure generated when holding, the measurement process can interfere with the measurement results.
As early as 1974, Bligh et al. first proposed the application of wireless remote sensing technology to animal surface temperature monitoring, and discussed the feasibility of using wireless telemetry technology.
At the same time, facing some obstacles, Bai et al. used wireless radio frequency communication technology and infrared temperature sensor technology to achieve real-time temperature measurement of sows.
The MLX90614 infrared temperature sensor is used to obtain the sow rump temperature, and the measured temperature is sent to the server through the gateway node, and the temperature compensation is carried out according to the relationship between the rump temperature and the rectal temperature to improve the temperature measurement accuracy.
Chen et al. designed a breeding monitoring system, which uses sensors to monitor the physiological signs and environmental parameters of pigs, and uses wireless sensor network technology to connect and integrate resources such as single-chip microcomputer, wireless sensor network, WIFI communication module, and body temperature acquisition module through the server.
The system can obtain vital signs such as pig body temperature and temperature and humidity data of the breeding environment in real time, and users can view these data through Android mobile phones or PCs.
The development of these technologies provides a more scientific and efficient way for animal temperature monitoring, and has a wide application prospect in the breeding industry and scientific research.
conclusion
Traditional methods of body temperature measurement have many problems: the stress response and labor consumption caused by contact temperature measurement. We are constantly exploring more scientific and efficient ways to measure body temperature. In recent years, using radio frequency technology and contact temperature sensing technology, we have successfully developed a system that automatically obtains the temperature of the animal's body surface, realizing 24-hour automatic monitoring.
The application of non-invasive measurement technology has also made progress, using wireless technologies such as infrared temperature sensors to achieve real-time monitoring of animal body temperature. These new technologies provide useful tools for animal health monitoring and the development of the breeding industry, and make positive contributions to improving animal welfare and improving breeding efficiency.
Some implantable thermometers still have problems with the potential to harm animals when immobilized, as well as complex operations that require recalibration after a period of use. Future research will need to continuously optimize and refine these technologies to ensure their feasibility and effectiveness in actual farming environments.
«——[References] ——»
- ZHANG Yun et al. (2012). Application of body temperature measurement in pig industry. Agricultural Science and Technology and Equipment,5(2),30-34.]
- LI Ming et al. (2017). Design and implementation of aquaculture monitoring system based on wireless sensor network. Information Technology in Agriculture,8(3),45-52.]
- CHEN Hua et al. (2014). Research progress on non-invasive measurement technology of pig body temperature. Progress in Veterinary Medicine,22(4),50-55.