Goodvalley

Goal

Monitoring of pigs health and pigsty condition

The Danish pig producer Goodvalley with a turnover of billions in Poland, Ukraine and Russia has embarked on a digital journey that targets to digitize the entire production chain from pig barn to the refrigerated counter in the super market. The goal is to fight disease and increase productivity.

Overview

The company had a turnover of DKK 1.56 billion in 2019 and employs around 2.300 people in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. In Denmark, only six employees are in the staff functions at the head office in Copenhagen and Goodvalley needs to have an easy and updated view of the entire operation as well as being able to deep dive into operation areas of interest.

Goodvalley owns the entire value chain

Goodvalley is certified CO2-neutral by German TÜV, and it has been achieved e.g. through the production of electricity for their own consumption via gasification of residual waste from pig production in nine biogas plants.

Goodvalley owns the entire value chain from feed production on 42,000 hectares of land in the three production countries to the slaughterhouses and around 43,000 animals any day of the year.

Collect, normalize and consolidate diverse data sources

Goodvalley utilises many different solutions for data collection in their operation, but the various providers of systems and apps are in many cases not integratable. Goodvalley has therefore used Beacon Tower as their general IoT platform for data collection that is ‘hardware agnostic’ – ie. as the back-end to collect data from any type of sensor, machine or other hardware in their operation from which data flows.

Beacon Tower collects data locally in the pig stables, from e.g. water meters that are again collected on a local legacy server that then communicates with the Beacon Tower IoT Edge gateway.

From Beacon Tower, new modules can be put into operation, existing modules updated, and the condition of the entire system monitored. Data from water meters and other sensors are sent via internet connection from the stables to Beacon Tower.

The data is then through Beacon Tower’s flexible asset system logically divided into e.g. pig batches by age, size and location in the pigsty, and data can be compared with reference curves. In case of deviations, an alarm can be sent to the local manager or veterinarian on site.

Collecting data from diverse water meters was the first step, but there are plenty of other opportunities to explore. For example, Goodvalley will do anything to keep the disease African swine fever out of pig pens. That is why the trucks transporting the pigs are today driven through a ‘bakery’ and heated to 60 degrees Celsius to kill bacteria and viruses. Next step is expected to be installation of temperature sensors inside the truck. This allows Goodvalley to ensure that the correct temperature is reached and if this does not happen, the door will not be opened for the truck. And Beacon Tower will be the place where data resides for users and other systems to utilise.