Thibault has received a US patent on the highly technical weighing system.

Twelve years ago, he wanted to find a way to get animals to weigh themselves automatically. Finally, the Weight Watcher scale was invented, which sorts animals for split-weight feeding, based on a calculated median weight of a herd.

“What we developed was a system where animals would just walk through one of these scales and automatically get weighed,” Thibault said.

The weight distribution collected one day is used the next day to find the median weight of the hogs, and they are separated into two pens according to that number. Based on the weights collected with use of the electronic ear tag, the complex system, allows producers to segregate the pigs by size so the smaller hogs don’t have to compete with larger ones.


“What the farmer wants is to have everybody grow fast, grow well, grow healthy and hopefully grow at the same rate so they can all go to the market at the same time,” Thibault said. “That’s got a lot of economic importance. Basically, it’s a matter of getting people to recognize the value of using this kind of equipment.”

Marketing underweight or overweight hogs can result in market price deductions, and the under or overfeeding can hurt the profit bottom line.

The system is currently running in Australia, Japan, Germany, England and Canada.

Source: HDNews.net