By Jack Bosworth, Director, FJ Bosworth & Sons. Published 25 April 2024.
I hope everyone is well, and has seen at least some improvement in the weather conditions. Although still not as warm as we would like it to be here.
A new piece of innovative technology coming into the unit
Further to my last piece on optimising feed plans for gilts during gestation, we are soon to have an exciting piece of innovative technology fitted within our gestation accommodation.
We are working with another company who are going to be installing:
- An automated weigh scale within the feed station exit corridor.
- A camera system working alongside the scales.
The concept is straightforward, even if the technology is not.
How the system will work
Every time gilts and sows exit a feed station, the system will:
- Recognise the individual animal via EID (electronic identification).
- Capture an accurate weight at that moment and assign it to the sow card.
- Capture a paired camera image of the animal in the same location.
Over time, the camera will be trained to recognise body condition based on the images it captures. The pairing of accurate weight data with the matching visual condition will, in theory, let the system learn what good body condition actually looks like on our animals.
Why this matters for how we manage feeding
We are excited for this technology to enter what is already an advanced area of the unit.
The collection of new data should be valuable on two fronts:
- For the company developing and testing the condition-scoring camera, since real-world training data on a working unit is exactly what they need.
- For us, providing significantly more intelligence on which to make informed decisions.
The aim, eventually, is that we can tailor feed plans to individual animals with increased confidence, in addition to (and possibly in place of) some of the current factors we consider. Those being age, parity and manual body condition scoring.
Manual condition scoring is still done very well by Alex and the team. The point of the new system is not to replace good stockmanship. It is to give the team a steady, objective, individual-level data stream that the eye alone cannot maintain across hundreds of animals every week.
Elsewhere on the farm, a busy month
It has been another busy month.
- Emma has been brilliant in the office with year-end administrative work. The office side is increasingly substantial as the business grows, and having Emma’s energy on it has made a real difference.
- Ed has done remarkably well to get the spring barley drilled, while also navigating around our customers for contract spreading.
We have continued to make progress with infrastructure upgrades, including:
- Better alarm monitoring systems on pig buildings.
- A new weighbridge.
Other tasks running in the background:
- FETF applications for productivity and slurry equipment.
- Preparation for the planning appeal on the on-farm butchery.
- Reviewing our succession plans.
That last one is the unglamorous, quietly important work that every family farming business has to do properly to be confident there will still be a family farming business to talk about in a generation’s time.
Editor’s note (May 2026)
The Agsenze and Agrisys system Jack describes here was subsequently fitted on the unit. By September 2024, the trial was providing weight data on around 200 gilts and sows during gestation, and was already giving the team information that Alex felt would not have been picked up by eye alone. The succession planning conversation referenced here became a much larger topic after the October 2024 Autumn Budget changes to Agricultural and Business Property Relief, which Jack writes about in his November 2024 piece.
About the author
Jack Bosworth is a fourth-generation farmer and Director of FJ Bosworth & Sons, an arable and pig farming business at Spains Hall, Willingale, Essex. The farm has been in the family since 1919, and Jack farms alongside his father Stuart Bosworth, who was named Farmers Weekly Pig Farmer of the Year in 2011. The business is Red Tractor assured and runs an integrated farm-to-fork model, with home-grown cereals milled on site using solar-generated electricity.
You can follow Jack’s articles on fjbosworth.com, or get in touch via the WhatsApp link on the site.
Fourth-generation farmer at Spains Hall, Willingale. Runs the contracting team and writes most of what appears here.