Tag: vehicle

Describing vehicle movement patterns within a production system in the Midwest – Part 2

This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.

This is the second part of the project presented to you last week. The MSHMP team developed a method to track vehicle movement patterns in a system.

Key Points:

  • Twelve vehicles transporting weanling pigs and culled sows can interconnect a third of the premises within a Midwest swine system of more than 300 farms. 
  • The system is highly inter-connected, with three identified clusters (“communities”)
  • Each farm can be reached (after passing) through 3 farms within the system-network.
Continue reading “Describing vehicle movement patterns within a production system in the Midwest – Part 2”

Describing vehicle movement patterns within a production system in the Midwest

This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project. The previous editions of the science page are available on our website.

This week the MSHMP team presents the results of their latest project which proposed to first record vehicle movement patterns to then add that future disease prediction models. This is part 1 of their report. Part number 2 will be on the blog next week.

Key Points

  • Utilizing movement data to understand network connectivity can provide insights impacting disease control, animal welfare, and other areas.
  • The number of vehicle movements is constant over season and year, with no high or low seasons indicating a constant level of contacts. 
  • From this subset of transport data, most of the trips are to sow farms (32.5%) and Truck-wash facilities (37.6%).
  • The average time for vehicle cleaning, disinfection and baking (at the truck-wash facilities) was ~3hrs.
Continue reading “Describing vehicle movement patterns within a production system in the Midwest”