A Wright Farms Case Study on the Value of EveryPig
Summary: Prior to integrating EveryPig into their everyday operations, Wright Farms struggled to optimize the health of their pigs. Specifically, streamlining processes to effectively monitor pigs’ health and intervene in real-time posed a significant challenge that undermined Wright Farms’ ability to maintain pig health. To address this barrier to profitability, Wright Farms leveraged EveryPig. In this case study, we summarize the ways that EveryPig improved Wright Farms’ operations to enhance animal welfare and increase profits.
Wright Farms and EveryPig
The team at Wright Farms, located in Iowa, had noticed that health challenges were compromising their pigs’ welfare and the farm’s overall profitability. In addition to common pig ailments, the pigs at Wright Farms also faced disease outbreaks and nutritional deficiencies.
To prevent these health issues and the complications associated with them, Wright Farms was interested in developing mechanisms to better monitor pig health and to manage pig health more proactively through improved health protocols. After experiencing little success meeting these goals with other solutions, the Wright Farms team turned to EveryPig.
Enabling early identification of compromised health
Upon learning about Wright Farm’s objectives, the owner of EveryPig suggested using EveryPig tools to identify health issues in pigs early, thereby staving off serious medical conditions and preventing unnecessary mortality. EveryPig enabled early identification of health issues in multiple ways.
- Better monitoring. With EveryPig, the workers at Wright Farms could – for the first time – monitor the pigs’ health in a systematic and comprehensive way that allowed them to readily identify health issues as they arose and to rapidly intervene to produce better health outcomes.
- Enhanced transparency around health-related information. With information tracked and stored in the EveryPig app, all members of the team possessed ongoing access to health-related information. Not only did this improve efficiency related to healthcare, but it also made it easier to identify health trends so that care could be optimized.
- More efficient resource allocation. Because EveryPig makes it easy to collect clinical information and share it digitally, healthcare providers were able to better triage pigs and use telemedicine where appropriate. Providers could therefore focus their in-person visits on pigs that required that level of care.
Facilitating evidence-based health protocols
In addition to recognizing new health conditions in their pigs, Wright Farms hoped to take a more proactive approach to protecting animal welfare through illness prevention. To do so, they used EveryPig to analyze health-related data on the pigs and to identify factors impacting pigs’ health, as well as mortality trends.
The resulting insights helped Wright Farms have a deeper understanding of how to protect the pigs’ health, particularly in the face of specific risk factors like harsh environmental conditions. It also enabled them to produce evidence-based health protocols that improved the likelihood that pigs would remain healthy and recover quickly from illness.
Improving overall efficiency of swine management
Given that Wright Farms operates in a premium market, where pigs are raised in a natural setting, efficiency is critical. Costs are inevitably higher, so it is important not only to maximize the value of each pig, but to ensure efficient operations.
In that vein, Wright Farms had recognized the need for better inventory management and pig tracking, which they were able to successfully address with EveryPig. With access to various metrics related to their operations, Wright Farms was able to improve their overall efficiency in several ways, including:
- Eliminating paperwork. EveryPig enabled Wright Farms to store all the information relevant to their pigs in a single location and thereby discontinue the inefficient and often unreliable practices of employing spreadsheets and manually entering data. With this added efficiency and elimination of paperwork, those working on the farm were able to spend less time dealing with data and more time focusing on other critical aspects of farm management.
- Facilitating efficient communication. With the information stored in the app, EveryPig made it easier than ever before for all members of the Wright Farms team to access information on demand. This capability allowed team members to circumvent the need for calls and emails to communicate information that could instead be discovered through the app.
- Streamlining everyday workflow. In addition to facilitating data entry and retrieval, the EveryPig app supplied critical insights into how to improve everyday workflow to ensure all relevant tasks were completed and done so efficiently.
Conclusion
EveryPig helped Wright Farms overcome their specific challenges around pig health while also supporting improved efficiencies throughout Wright Farms’ operations. Additionally, EveryPig use helped to facilitate a contract for Wright Farms with Berkshire Pigs, opening new opportunities for the farm. Overall, the partnership between Wright Farms and EveryPig was therefore successful, exceeding the expectations first outlined by Wright Farms.
