The technology to automatically weigh and sort market hogs has been available for about a decade and there are currently about a dozen systems available commercially. Ciaran Ormond is one of the partners in Partners in Pork which operates three 12 hundred sow farrow to wean units near Rimby, Alberta and finishes pigs in either contract or lease barns. He says his operation began using the technology about five years ago to accommodate larger groups sizes.
We were probably one of the first ones that really got into it in western Canada so there was a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimentation and stuff. The original system we put in, we used it as a fully autosort, in a sense that we depended on the pigs to go through the system themselves and then come out but, what we found with that was we only had about 85 to 90 percent success rate, accuracy so the initial systems we had, then we changed it so we did what we can a forced sort. We actually physically put the pigs through the scale and then they're weighed and sorted into three different groups and we've had probably 97 percent on average, 97-98 percent in the right weight range with those ones we've gone for.
Ormond suggests the biggest advantage in his operation is the autosort technology has reduced the task of sorting market hogs from a two person job to a one person job and eliminated much of the stress and frustration from the process. However, he notes, keeping within that narrow 85 to 95 kilogram weight range can be worth as much as 20 dollars per pig at the packing plant.
(Source: Farmscape)
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