By EMMA HOPKINS-O’BRIEN

Indiana Correspondent

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — At a showcase during the Swine Innovation Summit hosted by Indiana Pork and SVG Ventures, five CEOs of ag- and swine-related startup companies presented their products to a room of stakeholders and experts in the pork industry.

From disease and management strategy to food safety, these products promise to make slicker work out of necessary tasks and precautions associated with the pork industry.

Local to Indiana was Blake Neubauer of West Lafayette, CEO of Teichos Labs LLC, which produces an innovative advanced immunity amplifier (AIA) that can improve vaccine responses against Porcine Respiratory Reproductive Syndrome (PRRS) – and potentially other vaccines important to animal health.

“Our AIA presents a huge opportunity,” Neubauer said. “The total loss from PRRS each year is $664 million per year, and there is currently no effective vaccine.”

The company partnered with Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine to develop the AIA, and has the goal of capturing value in the PRRS vaccine market through improvements in outcomes, production efficiency, animal welfare, and safety. The vaccine-enhancing product provides better disease prevention by boosting underperforming vaccines.

Teichos is seeking a partner to invest in the AIA development for improved animal health vaccination outcomes.

SwineTech, Inc., an ag-tech and animal health company, was also represented at the startup showcase via Matthew Rooda, the company’s CEO from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  He presented SmartGuard, a SwineTech device that uses voice recognition to provide aid to piglets in distress during their nursing stage.

SmartGuard sensors control each microclimate and track the health and well-being of each sow and her piglets while litters are still small enough to be potentially crushed by their mother when trying to nurse. Rooda said the product enables farmers to predict and manage costs, maximizing revenues to substantially improve labor and process inefficiencies, resulting in an exceptional quality of life for the pigs in their care.

“It’s a challenge to have the barn staffed 24/7 and it’s a challenge to save these piglets from being crushed, but at SwineTech, we solve these problems,” he said. “SmartGuard tells us what is needed, when it’s needed.”

Just this year, Rooda said SmartGuard has protected 1 million piglets. Approximately 160 million die from crush each year, or about 9 percent of all piglets born. As a result, 34.9 billion pounds of pork is wasted annually, costing the industry $25 billion each year.

The product sells on a subscription basis and can be upgraded to provide environmental data, behavioral data, mortality insights, nursing analytics, birthing analytics, and health alerts. One device can oversee 160 litters per year.

Randall Schwartzentruber, CEO of Kitchener, Ontario-based BinSentry, presented his product designed to allow feed mills and vertical integrators to realize significant savings by offering accurate and timely on-farm feed inventory data via “Internet of Things” (IoT) hardware and supporting software.

The product allows feed mills to automate feed ordering by sensing the amount of grain left in a bin.

“For the past 40 years, a wooden mallet has been the tool that feed mills and vertical integrators most rely on to determine how much feed inventory is in a grain bin on a customer’s farm,” Schwartzentruber explained. “This is why feed mills struggle to get accurate information. We invite you, and feed mills everywhere to #RetireTheMallet.”

He said mills lose millions of dollars each year due to inefficiency, by reducing last-minute orders that are called into the mill that cost them huge amounts of money in transportation costs. BinSentry is solar-powered, self-cleaning, and does not require modification to an existing grain bin.

From Herman, Neb., Scott Niewohner is the CEO of Hog Wash, a company that produces robots capable of automatically cleaning swine facilities to maintain barn hygiene and prevent chronic illness in animals. Hog Wash replaces manual, routine power-washing of pig facilities with which all swine managers and operators are intimately familiar.

“The bottom line, is this is a crappy job,” quipped Niewohner. “Labor is getting harder to find by the day, and we have found that our prototype reduces labor by half and creates a consistently clean area that is equal to or better than a human operator in terms of quality.”

The automatic washer takes 30 percent less time to clean a hog facility than the average laborer. These robots are self-propelled, self-guided, and use less water than is needed to clean facilities manually.

The last showcase, presented by Mark Byrne of Columbus, Ohio-based ProteoSense LLC, was a look at RapidScan, a product that uses solid-state biosensor technology for food safety testing for foodborne and environmental pathogens.

The high-sensitivity field-portable system detects foodborne pathogens without incubation, reducing total test time from days to hours – a tenfold improvement over existing tests. Other modern food tests often provide too little, too late, according to Byrne; that is, by the time food is tested and the results are in, illnesses have had time to fester and major damage has been done to a brand’s image and reputation.

An asset of RapidScan is that one doesn’t need to be a microbiologist to use it, and testing can be done on-site, eliminating the time and expense of sending samples to a lab.

“Food safety testing, the way it’s done today, is the same way it’s been done for years,” Byrne said. “We’re going to change that by getting it done in two hours or less. It affects every food category, it’s global, it hasn’t gone away, and it needs better solutions.”

RANDALL SCHWARTZENTRUBER speaks about Bin Sentry, a product that can accurately sense the amount of grain left in a bin.

(Emma Hopkins-O’Brien photo)