Iowa Swine Day 2024 The Challenges and Opportunities of a Changing Technology Landscape

our first speaker is Matthew Ruda uh Matthew is the founder and CEO of swin Tech Incorporated leading a team committed to transforming animal agriculture globally through Innovative workforce management and humid centered automation his Flagship product Pig flow enhances operational efficiencies in pig care by streamlining routine tasks emergency care and herd Diagnostics thereby empowering pork producers rud's background in gen background is genetics Prem medicine and animal agriculture fueled his passion uh for integrating technology into livestock care leading to founding swich in 2015 since then he's been recognized as Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and awarded by uh the Farm Bureau MIT Microsoft Under Armour and many others he also steered the company through uh significant achievements including uh participation in the Pierce Lions accelerator in Ireland raising over $8 million in venture capital and expanding the business globally Beyond swi Tech Ruda enjoys hosting the popular Pig podcast engaging a community of experts in discussions about swine production and Entrepreneurship uh please join me in welcoming uh Matthew to the stage here thank [Applause] you well thank you to everybody who showed up for this talk today we're going to really talk about the challenges and opportunities facing the swine industry and how that is factored into the change ing technology landscape as well as as a lot of things are changing as technolog is becoming more embraced and more feasible and as introduced I'm Matthew R I'm the co-founder and CEO of swin Tech uh grew up in the swine industry worked a little bit in healthc care and by accident ended up becoming an entrepreneur in the swine industry along the way and so today we're going to talk about some of the challenges that are actually driving Innovation what are the things that are justifying an expense towards trying something new we're going to talk a little bit about true vers Truth uh this is going to be something maybe that you hear today that's quite unique but that we've held pretty close to ourselves as we've tried to work through uh and grow our business we're going to talk about the technology adoption life cycle and I'm going to throw in a little bit of a tweak that you might not have heard before as well on how you can see yourself in that adoption life cycle and how you might want to be more self-aware in the way that you manage your place on that cycle and then we're going to talk about some of the technology infrastructure that's been changing a little bit here and it's also becoming more integrated and so what are the pieces of the puzzle that are going to redefine the way that we look at technology in farms and then we're going to talk a little bit about some of the technologies that have been quite new and exciting over the past a few years here in the Precision Tech space which ones are thriving uh which ones are kind of more or less proven and then which ones are still in that early adopter phase uh that we should be aware of and then how do we J justify Innovation from a cost standpoint I'm going to talk a little bit about the producers perspective but I'm also going to bring in outside Capital perspective to help you understand where money is going to be coming from in the over the course of the next decade and then we're going to talk about how you can apply this to your your operations and so first no surprise mortality mortality is a major driver of innovation in the space the nice thing about improving mortality is it has a triple bottom line benefit we can improve welfare we can improve sustain ility by reducing waste and we can improve profitability and so we gain in a lot of areas making this a very ripe area for Innovation labor is also another area right now that's driving a need for Innovation we're having a hard time finding individuals onboarding and retaining and when we do bring people into our operations that have less experience it's becoming more and more noticeable that without understanding what's happening in the farm there's not a lot of clarity as to whether or not the strategies that we've identified as an organization are actually being deployed uh correctly and so without knowing that it's very hard to make decisions and so there's an area around labor and then there's also an area around technology there's a lot of Technology that's been sent to our industry and developed within our industry over the last 10 20 years but a lot of it doesn't succeed despite working often what we find is that most Technologies are not fully automating a process they're really just identifying a problem that we would have not been able to identify earlier or it's giving us an earlier heads up however it's still relying on labor to respond to the issue and execute on resolving the issue for us to get the ROI and the real challenge here is that when we put a piece of technology into 30 40 barns the actual utilization and compliance to the use of that technology or use of that product or program is quite inconsistent therefore the ROI isn't consistent and producers are hesitant to bring it across the whole system because you can't forecast the r I as as much as you'd like to and so jumping into true verse truth so what is true verse truth true verse truth is a way of verifying what you're actually uh doing as an organization we're making decisions so true is what you believe and Truth is what's been verified and this seems quite simple but quite often we're making decisions off of confidence that we have without it actually having ever been verified and so when we talk through this presentation you think through some of the decisions that you're making on a day-to-day basis ask is is this something I believe to be true or is this something that I have verified as truth and something that simple can cut through a lot of BS and uh help help make more strategic decisions and so the technology adoption life cycle and so this is a study that was actually done by Iowa State University on Iowa Seed corn Farmers probably something you've seen before the cool thing with this is I had no idea this came from Iowa State years ago when this was introduced to me when we were starting our entrepreneur urial Journey uh this was just something you saw at every major university at every entrepreneurial event it is the core of how tech companies uh think about adoption within various markets and it all started here and and this is what that looks like so you have your innovators your early adopters your Chasm which is something that really is difficult to cross for many between those first two categories and the early majority late majority and lagard so before I even continue I'd like for you think about where on this curve you you sit are you the guy that has to have the new thing even though nobody you know has it are you the guy who gets it once your Innovative friends tell you see it's good or are you somebody who's at the weigh end and the Skeptics laggards where you pretty much have to be forced onto this those are the guys with flip phones a year or two ago still like that's that's the lagard and so this curve I think when we started looking at it and understanding it is it it often sits in a place where people kind of cement themselves into a into a process they make decisions the same way year after year after year regardless of the problems that come their way but some problems actually lessen as time goes on and some worsen as time goes on and so a way way we can be more self-aware around adoption of of new Solutions and working within a company culture is understanding and becoming more self-aware on where we sit on this curve and how where we sit might actually be making things worse for for ourselves so an example of things that lessen as time goes on ESF 20 years ago if you were implementing an ESF system you were maybe early right and so you took on a lot of the added cost and you were the guinea pig but today not only are you not the guinea pig you have hundreds of individuals you can pretty much call you have seminars that are that are going on that tell you exactly how to do it the right way and in many cases and we'll talk about it later it's in a lot of ways cheaper than the standard approach and so if you're implementing an ESF today that's a lot easier than what it used to be but there's other problems that are much harder and I like to look at sourcing labor there's companies 10 years ago who planted a flag in Mexico and other countries and said we are going to be sourcing some of the most talented individuals that we can find from other countries to offset some of these future labor challenges that we're going to be facing and what happened they built a reputation people kept coming back but they also communicated back to families and friends saying this is a company you need to work for and it became a destination and there's companies who decided you know what I'm going to do this last year and the well was dry they didn't have a reputation and they were at an automatic disadvantage and one aspect of Labor here that made it much more difficult is we went from competing regionally for talent skipped nationally in a big way and we went right to Global so the talent that we are trying to Source today outside of of the US is the same talent that Australia Canada and many other countries are also trying to compete for so not only is what is the US doing as a swine industry to stand out but what are you doing within the US to stand out and those who jumped on this early really benefited from it and those who who were late it probably hurt them more than it helped them and so where do you fall in the adoption curve is it helping or hurting you sometimes it's good to know if you're the kind of guy who likes to try new things maybe we should waight and if you're the guy who normally has to be pushed into things maybe I need to consider going outside of my comfort zone and trying something new goes both ways but it's really important to understand where you are so that way you can manage that and then what are some of the biases that we have and how is this making things better or worse one good example there might even be around labor when we look at new technologies that come in that we're going to talk about if I told you that it was 70 80% successful most people would say heck no there's no way touching it's not good enough yet but when we look at Staffing in the in this industry about one in three one in four hires actually make it through an entire year and so if we're 30% successful in bringing on staff and super comfortable with it yet aren't very comfortable in bringing in technologies that have third party verification that it's probably going to work maybe we have some bias on what's comfortable versus what's new in regards to evaluating that so even looking at the ROI of of our talent of our team when we do make a new hire what is the projected Roi and are do we have a unrealistic gap between what we expect technology to do for us to offset labor and what we expect a new hire to do in offsetting labor and so the modern technology landscape so this is something from my perspective I'm sure there's going to be a lot of different perspectives out there mine's heavily influenced from Healthcare so I grew up in the swine industry but studied genetics and biotechnology at Iowa to One Day become an obstetrician and so I worked in nursing homes and hospitals used Epic Systems patient management systems various Precision Technologies and what we found there was that as and what we've learned through this whole process is as Industries become more technically I guess experienced they become more segmented it's much harder for a company to hit all of the segments of technology that are necessary uh to grow and so Healthcare is a unique example because it's a low margin business whether we believe it or not hospital nursing home it's low margin labor is their biggest constraint and quality of care defined success or failure along with management of cost it's incredibly similar in the way you need to manage uh manage it that way and when we were in the nursing homes and we were providing care one of the biggest challenges we had was that when somebody needed help they would hit a button and a light would go on outside the door and so when you're doing meds and you're working the floors you'd walk out and you'd see eight lights on and you went to the closest light because you didn't know what people needed it was just they needed help you also didn't know how long they were waiting and so one guy might want to change the TV station and another guy might have actually fallen and needs to go to the hospital you would have no idea but what they did in between patient records is they added in patient management systems which communicated what was wrong filtered it through Sops so that way caregivers could see all right here's who needs help here's how long they've been waiting and here's the type of sensor that triggered and they also implemented Precision Technologies like cameras that literally watch how people walk down a hallway to see if they develop a limp to see if there's a lame like if they're going to have a leg issue so very equivalent to the lameness technology that's being developed right now in cell Farms it's very weird very eerie but it's very similar at the same time so we applied this Tech stack to the swine industry Tred to understand okay where is where is this fit and so we have like electronic health records recordkeeping systems that have been around for a long time and they focus on what has happened and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the Innovation that's happening within that space and then you have some work that we're doing and we're the first but we won't be the last around patient management so how do we actually focus on helping people in the farm provide care right now and then the third layer Precision Technologies which usually is identifying a problem and not fully automating a problem so we as we see these segments grow mature and expand in the swine industry there's an ever need for integration across the three uh so that they can all work together and that's starting to become more matured as well and so to start with the data Management Systems records uh many of you are familiar with the brands here uh data is becoming more custom than ever before so whether you're service helping a producer or you are a producer one thing to really think about is that as business intelligence tools become more prevalent in our industry your feed data your marketing data your Workforce data your financials all of that is going to start to be easier to combine within and across one another to make decisions the problem here is doing this isn't cheap it takes somebody with a decent amount of skill in these in these tool sets and that's not always going to be affordable to everybody but that's where my recommendation comes for how you think about the future within this Tech stack Outsource or hire so if you are 15,000 or 20,000 or more SS in the next three to five years is probably going to be a normal thing for you to be looking for a data scientist to bring on staff if you aren't already today if you are smaller than that it's probably time to start thinking about who are the partners that I can Outsource to that will be able to help provide this to me and I know some of the vet management companies are becoming more proficient and offering this as a service but looking at your data not just as a standard report from your herd records but more as an integrated system through business intelligence tools which will be very customized to your specific situation is going to become more and more uh prevalent in the industry so now when we hop into the second segment we really focusing around process and execution these are some questions to really ask yourself we went out and did customer Discovery with over a couple hundred individuals and uh 32 of the top 40 producers and we asked these questions you know where can you pull your compliance data today do you know if you are executing on your processes and if so how how are we getting there um all of them at the time said no and so that's where we identified that that middle layer like in healthcare had a place in the swine industry and so we developed a tool called Pig flow which focuses on providing more insight to how can we be better communicators in the farm how can we be more organized and how can we better execute against our processes and this works by bringing connectivity to the sell Farm if people are going to be able to work together and they're going to have a transparent understanding of what's going on it's very important that they have that visibility and to do that we need to be connected and so connectivity in the farm everybody has a device and then produ producer data actually filters through custom Sops and then presents information in a way that helps re reinforce certain behaviors throughout the day whether that's on treatments early Pig cares uh the list goes on and so what this does is it helps ensure that the people are in the right place at the right time more often uh providing better care for the pigs this is is not using data to reuse reports or any of that this is purely about helping the person at the slat level understand right now what do I need to care care about and and when do I need to care about it and so what this does is it allows you to coach during the game uh this execution layer uh I I like to liken it to a statement Barrett made once he's like today in the swine industry on a sell Farm without this layer it's like going to a football game putting up your play sheet and saying all right here you go and then at the end of the day saying okay did we win or lose well it was 24 to 17 we won great what worked what didn't how do we get better but instead in sports right they're able to watch every play they make adjustments during the day and by the end of the day they're better off for it today we can't do that as an industry we cannot make adjustments throughout the day based off of any relevant information it's on look touch feel it's what's true versus what's truth and so when we can do that more often we start to win more and when we can win more and know why we're winning uh we can be more successful as an operation and start to really hit on just about every cap within the sou Farm by doing that the third layer is Precision Technologies so there's a bunch of them out there I tried to focus on relevant categories based off of what is both proven and what is exciting and I'll liken it to where we kind of are in that adoption curve through these in the industry so the first one ESF ESF front exit bag eggs that I'm not going to get into it because you guys have plenty of uh talks that have gone over ESF for the last 20 years but what I do want to hit on was a presentation that was given at npic that brought things to a different lens in the way we look at ESF in a lot of uh cases ESF actually helps us better utilize the barn right we don't have all the hall wise hallways and open pendis station like we do in a stall barn and so we get better Barn utilization that is a big deal I don't think that's something that people walk in and automatically think if I go to open pen or if I go to an ESF model I'm going to be able to better utilize my barn space the second is because of the cost of materials and steel conrete it's a lot more expensive now or it's more expensive now to outfit a stall barn than what it is open penion or open pen SF so I'm really just going to focus on the first three and not get into the whole prop 12 and all of that but at the end of the day it's cheaper to implement an ESF today than to Retro fit a stal barn and that's that's something that I think is also quite new uh in the modern era the second category wirless monitoring and so there's a couple different companies that have been quite successful right here out of Iowa so Barn tools is one of them where you buy your your system it's wireless it's all new and that allows you to have live understanding of temperature humidity scales and so on and then you also have distinct which takes more of a retrofit approach where they say you know you already have all the sensors in the barn why buy new ones when you can just take the wires out of your current system and plug them into RS it's cheaper and you can move forward that way so the nice thing about the current status of Wireless monitoring today is that you have two very different approaches that can fit your needs as you see them and so that's that's pretty great as well these two solutions have been adopted a ton across the industry in the last few years so you're not even close to being a guinea pig at at best your early majority now and uh this could this should be considered a very low-risk investment at this point computer vision is also another category that's been worked on for 10 years now and I think we keep asking the question when is this actually going to be practical for production and we keep getting closer and closer and closer and I can say before doing research for this a few months ago I thought we were really close but what we found is that in some categories we're there and some were pretty much there and in others were still quite a ways away and so when we look at guilt selection and what pic's been able to do with their computer vision and the selection of guilts that's done a phenomenal job in helping them further guilt selection and although it's something you'll probably never have to decide to do or get involved with this has been a real step forward for the industry when it comes to computer vision for pig counting Roma has also had this solution out on the market for a while uh took a while to kind of get it to where producers were trusting it but today I'd say this is pretty common to see in a lot of the barns that we'll walk into people are pretty happy with what they're seeing here and the the the build of it is much more practical and so for those of you who don't know about the Roma Pig counting technology it's a system that allows you to have a camera above load load shoots that just counts the pigs as they go in and out and they did some fun stuff at World Pork where they asked people to count the pigs and they tried to see how long could you actually keep up um one thing I asked for them to do was to send me some information on what are what are the returns that they're seeing for a technology like this yes it's cool to count a pig we all know counting pigs kind of sucks but at the end of the day what is the ROI potential and what they found on some recent studies that they did was that it not only reduced the time of loading pigs it actually reduce the number of people needed to do the job as well so you cut a person and reduce time all at the same time so that was pretty great to see from them however to me the real sticking point here is when I go into a sell Farm I'm seeing this much more often and I'm not hearing people complain about it and I think that's a a real key Point here uh they're really happy with what they're seeing now in regards to some of the camera and computer vision technologies that exist for finishing I think that's where we're starting to have kind of a crapshoot uh we've got a lot of solutions out there that are trying to weigh pigs and uh and measure Health in finishing and we're at a place now where these Technologies work very well in the areas that they've been designed and as they're being more commercialized into new barns they're still in that optimizing stage where maybe the lighting isn't quite right or there's a feeder in a different spot or we didn't know you power washed at this time there's weird things and they're still fine-tuning but we're not far off we're still probably years away from this being something that regular in a site and a lot of producers are saying you know instead of bringing these and putting them above every pen I'm just going to put two in my barn and let those two pens serve as a a sign of what's happening through the rest of the barn but it's not there yet there's still probably a a a pretty big guinea pig at this point but it's coming and uh that's going to be really exciting I think for the industry especially on the finishing spot side of it so how do we justify innovation in agriculture this will be air fairly new way of seeing this the first though we're going to take the producer perspective does it have a compelling business case is it easy to use does it make the job for the staff easier better even if it's not more efficient are my people happier is it going to help me retain my people does it improve care for the pig and is the ongoing use of this tool predictable or is this going to be something that works in my research barn and then I bring it to my commercial operations and I have no stinking clue so th those are some really big key points for am I going to invest in something but when we talk about how do we fund innovation in the space the question we really have to ask is where is the funding going to come from so coming from the Venture side and the a side a bit I've been able to experience a lot within this space and so I can quite confidently tell you what the expectation is and where funding is likely coming and not coming from and so when we talk about new Solutions it needs to be a billion dooll paino if it's not a billion dooll paino smart money isn't investing in it so your Venture Capital uh companies right and if the opportunity does not have that total addressable Market it's just not worth their risk because they need to play that numbers game but when we look at what it would cost to get there is you're talking about was it 47 cents a pig or $14 a s a year to justify that kind of a market most people would say that that that that's crazy for a lot of solutions I mean that's that's a tough pill to swallow is an extra 50 cents a pig or extra 14 15 bucks a s and so a lot of these companies if they can't show value in other animal sectors are going to have a very very tough time getting external funding and so for your swine specific Solutions most of your Innovation is going to have to come from inside the industry or Angel Investors it is not going to come from Smart big Capital where they're like you know what swine industry that's an opportunity now Dairy had it different Dairy had opportunities where they were able to get that kind of capital and we've seen what that's done for the technology space there that's why technology is growing so much over there they're getting outside money in swine industry we can't expect that it's it's very unlikely given the way our markets are but also the way that we we focus on our spending so one thing to look at here is if we treat technology as it continues to be more prevalent in our industry as a commodity we will end up with mediocrity if we are not willing to invest what it takes to sustain good businesses in this market around technology and we focus more on cost competition across the tech space that might be what's best for the business and that's okay just know we will end up with mediocre Solutions compared to other Industries using similar technology maybe mediocre is all we need but that's just the that's just where we're going to be so how do we create a culture that Embraces change well when we think about our culture today one advantage we have differently than than past Generations is that whether you're old young from Mexico the US China we all use technology we pretty much all use technology in the same platform as a smartphone using very similar operating systems and so we have very common place regardless of what generation we are to communicate from now what is innovation that's also good to Define We Believe Innovation is what best can look like so as an organization as you are dri if if you want to drive Innovation throughout your organization it is very important that your leadership is identifying with your team what do we think best looks like if that isn't a common conversation well then the topic of innovation isn't even something that's often being had so in our organization what we do around this is we actually create processes within each department of our business which makes it a normal flow to focus on innovating that might be taking engineering bandwidth and saying you know what 60% of the time yeah we need to focus on the big items but for 15% of the time we need to be focused on certain feedback items and for this 10% we need to be focused on what you within engineering believe is important and so that 15% that's set aside for random feedback ideas that gets sent down to sales and customer success so now C sales and customer success can be guaranteed and assured that every quarter they're going to be getting 15% of engineering bandwidth that they can spend in any way they want and so then they collaborate and meet about how they can do it but by setting up processes that opens up time and space for Innovation you can start to incentivize and empower various team members at various levels within the organization to constantly be considering how they can be making things better whereas a lot of organizations are topheavy on Innovation and the guys at the middle or bottom levels of the organization never actually get to make a decision on making a key change to the organization that can help make it better and so think about ways in which you can create space at all layers of the organization to focus on regular continuous Improvement I think even in the S Bar when we're lab uh constraint and it's very difficult figuring out all right is there a way on a monthly or quarterly basis we can set aside time for these guys to think about is there a better way than what we're doing here than it just being on the the top outside of that and so uh shared a couple quotes here to kind of wrap things up that I found quite interesting the first is in the absence of clear communication team members fill the gaps with the assumptions and their own incorrect stories and so when we're not saying saying it they're coming up with their own perspective and that leads to inconsistencies which also isn't driving a consistent vision of what best can look like and then this one even more importantly when you're tired of saying it that's when people are finally starting to listen and I think this can be really frustrating because I don't know how many times you step back and say how many times have I said it's like yes but when you get to that level of frustration that's probably when people are actually finally starting to hear it enough to do something about it and so when you're thinking about innovating within your operations I like to say start small because in our industry sometimes we tend to get forced into massive change and without processes in place on how do we innovate next thing you know we're thrown into oh we got to go prop 12 and it's just this big show right but today what we could do is we could step aside and say what is something small where whether it works or doesn't it's really not going to be the end of the world let's build a process let's push it through it and see how that goes and the more comfortable we get testing the Small Things the easier it's going to be to implement the large things and at the end of the day whether it's small or large it shouldn't change much of the stress of change because it's something we're familiar with and at the end of the day we're comfortable with that process so start small find something you can test now and try to build a process around it and then again sustainable success comes from understanding your true vers truth not find not being subject to your bias or going off of what people feel is happening but what you know is happening and uh I appreciate you guys taking the time to hear this today and hopefully you take home something new any questions we've got a few minutes for questions so uh just open up the floor yeah thanks mat great talk that stri the robo yeah yeah so in an older presentation I had robotics uh specifically washow swine Robotics and the stuff they' done with automatic power washing systems at this point it's quite prevalent in the marketplace that those things are being added in I'd say uh they work quite well you just have to have realistic expectations of what they're going to get you um I think sometimes some of the negative things I've heard is that you spend as much time moving and monkeying around with it as you would if you just washed it and other times I hear people say you know what we walk in one guy sets up three of them for three rooms it washes 80% of the room and then another guy goes in and he touches them up and it's super efficient so I think the success of Robotics is going to be based on the way you implement it and not on whether they work or don't work at this point they they're proven to do their thing it's going to be on on your end of the side your side of the the game that's going to matter whether it's successful or not in regards to open AI that kind of stuff I think there's going to be a huge opportunity in the future of the industry for that specifically at the slat level I know some stuff we're focused on and some stuff other people are focused on would would dive into that world but if I'm at the slot level and I can say hey I'm looking for X Y and Z and it can scrape your database and say well if you're looking for a nurse s for this particular litter here are three candidates based on da d da or I'm new and I need to process pigs today what do I need to consider well here's the four steps that you need to think about when processing pigs according to your database or the pic database whoever's database you're using and I could even say hey I'm not feeling well today what's the sick policy and it could pump up your sick policy so I think our ability to communicate educate and support individ ual that are new and at that slot level whether it's in a decision they're making for their job or about their benefits or things that are happening within the company I think there's going to be a huge opportunity there um that's probably a few years out yet but that could be quite cool any more yeah work I only see it changing if the producer um is willing to force it I think if a producer steps back and says I will work with you I will be a part of of making this connection happen but you're going to make it happen or or I'm not doing it uh I think that that's going to be a big part of what makes it successful some people can do that quite well and some people might feel like maybe I'm not big enough to do that uh whether that's looking like we did in in the past with creating co-ops I mean maybe there's co-ops of innovation where hey we're all willing to come together to do this but at the end of the day you three four five technology companies you got to do X Y and Z or we're not playing but uh I think the producer is going to have to tell tech companies to cooperate cool well thank you guys [Applause]

2024-08-20 11:44

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