Supplier Spotlight: LightEdge

posted on Tuesday, May 8, 2018

On any given day, we have millions of data points flying through cyber space. Every day we care for 2.5 million pigs, and information on their health, care and productivity is collected at the pens—oftentimes via a sharpie marker on a sow or pen card—inputted daily into farm computers, piped through sophisticated programming and then rolled out into real time reports.

Metrics on energy usage, water usage, feed orders, health treatments and environmental records also stream in from the farms, while animal care, health and production information simultaneously flow into our internal “Tools” system, allowing our caretakers, veterinarians and support teams an instant dashboard of what is happening on every single farm.

As the saying goes, information is power. Having it at our fingertips helps us better collaborate, solve problems faster and find ways to get better. As farmers and pork producers, pushing forward to get better is part of our culture and who we are. We owe it to ourselves, our customers and our pork-loving consumers to keep improving how we care for our animals, our environment, our people and our communities.

None of this would be possible without metrics and measurement; access to real-time data; daily, weekly, monthly and annual goals; an action plan around how we’re going to improve; and our engaged and passionate people who bravely step forward and say “I will!” to producing the safe and quality food we all need to survive.

For this Supplier Spotlight, we’d like to thank the team at LightEdge in Altoona, Iowa—another Homegrown Iowa company. Iowa Select Farms annually houses five billion points of data with LightEdge, adding roughly four million new points of data every 24 hours.

Read the spotlight for the story here and thanks for following along on our Homegrown Iowa adventure!