Diseases such as African swine fever continue to disrupt China’s pig industry. Combined with a prolonged downturn in the pig cycle, rising farming costs, and increasingly stringent biosecurity standards, traditional manual farming has multiple biosecurity shortcomings, including inspection blind spots, cross-infection between people and pigs, delayed disease detection, and difficulties in tracing and control. Using the Lasseter AI + livestock farming system solution as a case study, this article explains how smart inspection, smart feeding, the livestock cloud platform, and other intelligent equipment can reshape farm biosecurity systems across five areas: early disease warnings, preventing human-mediated transmission, precision immunization and nutrition for pig herds, end-to-end digital traceability, and the value of industry implementation. This supports a shift in pig disease prevention from reactive response to proactive, early-stage control, providing a digital-intelligence implementation pathway for navigating industry cycles and establishing routine disease prevention and control.
I. Introduction: Industry challenges amid the normalization of African swine fever
2018: African swine fever was introduced into China, becoming a major disease-prevention threat to the pig farming industry. Classical strains have an extremely high fatality rate, while the spread of low-virulence and recombinant strains in recent years has made disease prevention and control increasingly complex. According to publicly available industry data, major diseases such as African swine fever cause the industry direct economic losses of over 300 billion yuan on average each year; in 2025, large-scale pig farms accounted for 68.3% of domestic market hog output, and increased farming density further amplified the risk of disease transmission.
Traditional farming relies heavily on manual experience, with clear shortcomings throughout the disease-prevention process: daily manual inspections cover only 30%-40% of pens, making it difficult to detect sick or weak pigs in time; personnel frequently enter and leave housing areas, creating a high risk of carrying viruses and causing cross-contamination; herd inventory, mortality and culling, and immunization are recorded manually on paper, resulting in insufficient data reliability and making it difficult to quickly trace transmission chains after an outbreak. These persistent challenges have long constrained improvements in the industry’s biosecurity standards.
The AI + breeding overall solution, built around rail-mounted visual robots, intelligent precision feeders, and a livestock cloud platform, has completed long-term deployment validation at large-scale pig farms in multiple provinces across China. It can establish a three-dimensional biosecurity barrier from multiple dimensions and promote a shift in industry disease prevention from passive response to proactive prevention.
Figure 1: Rail-mounted visual robot
II. Intelligent Monitoring and Early Warning: Building the First Line of Defense for Disease Detection
Early detection is a core challenge in disease prevention and control. Traditional manual inspections leave large areas unmonitored, while many diseases, such as African swine fever, show only subtle signs in the early stages of infection, including reduced activity, decreased feed intake, and elevated body temperature. These signs are difficult for staff to detect promptly, making it easy to miss the critical window for isolation and intervention.
The Lasseter track-mounted vision robot is an intelligent, all-weather monitoring hub for pig farms. It patrols automatically for 7×24 hours and completes 8-10 full-farm inspections per day, eliminating blind spots in manual monitoring. It automatically collects multidimensional data on pig body condition, feed intake, health status, and more, with an accuracy rate of over 95%. It sends real-time alerts with pen locations and actual photos. Abnormal disease conditions can be detected 24-48 hours earlier, providing critical time for isolation and disinfection.
The overall solution has now been deployed at scale by leading livestock enterprises in 21 provinces across China. A vast volume of visual data continuously improves the recognition algorithms, laying a technological foundation for early warning and early intervention for major diseases.
Figure 2: Track-mounted vision robot + intelligent precision feeder
Three. Biosecurity: Reduce human-pig contact and break the chain of disease transmission
Human contact is a key transmission route for African swine fever virus. The virus can attach to clothing, footwear, and tools, spreading between barns. Under traditional practices, feeding, inspections, immunization, and inventory checks all require staff to enter the barns. Frequent human-pig interactions continuously increase the risk of virus introduction. The LASCET solution is built around “replacing manual labor with machines,” systematically reducing the frequency of contact between people and pigs.
Track-mounted vision robots replace manual labor for daily inspections, backfat measurement, weight estimation, anomaly detection, and environmental monitoring, greatly reducing the frequency with which farm staff enter barns and move between them, and significantly lowering the risk of transmission by human vectors. The intelligent precision feeding system enables fully automated, contactless feed delivery: integrated with the body weight and backfat data collected by robots, the system generates a personalized feeding plan for each pig. Feed delivery error is controlled within 2%. Feed is dispensed automatically at set times and in set amounts, without requiring staff to move between pens to feed pigs manually.
AI vision monitors residual water and feed in troughs in real time, with a recognition accuracy of ≥95%. The system dynamically adjusts feed quantities, reducing the accumulation and mold growth of leftover feed and eliminating a medium for pathogen growth. The wet-feed practice of feeding smaller amounts more frequently shortens the time feed remains in pens, reducing the likelihood of feed contamination by dust and viruses and blocking disease transmission through feed.
Overall, intelligent technologies are shifting pig farms from labor-intensive to technology-intensive operations. LASCET Livestock Cloud integrates inspections, feeding, and environmental control into a unified digital management platform. Managers can remotely view live barn conditions on a large display or mobile app. Equipment and environmental anomalies are automatically tagged with the risk type, pen, and severity level, forming a complete “detection-notification-response-verification-assessment” closed loop. During outbreak control, managers can use the robot livestreaming feature to conduct health checks across the entire herd and adjust feeding strategies remotely without entering the farm, minimizing the risk of virus spread associated with staff entry and strengthening the foundation of biosecurity through contactless management.
Figure 3: Application scenarios for rail-mounted vision robots
Four. Precision management: Strengthening the herd’s ability to defend against endogenous diseases
After blocking external transmission, the pigs’ immunity to endogenous diseases is the second core element of disease prevention. To avoid widespread transmission after a virus enters the farm, the key is to improve the pigs’ own disease resistance and precisely isolate and manage sick pigs. This is also crucial to controlling endogenous diseases on pig farms. Traditional standardized feeding and management practices cannot account for individual differences between pigs, making problems such as nutritional imbalance and excessive intervention more likely. Intelligent systems have upgraded management from the group level to precise control of individual pigs.
Lasseter has established an intelligent closed loop of “inspection–analysis–decision-making–execution,” with all management actions driven by real-time, objective data. In sow operations, rail-mounted robots automatically collect backfat data for each sow, and the system dynamically adjusts feed amounts to balance nutrient supply, while digitally recording the sows’ health status throughout. Intelligent feeding can optimize sow reproductive health, reduce average monthly mortality and culling, and increase the average number of healthy piglets per litter, strengthening piglets’ innate disease resistance at the source.
Automatically monitors pig weights during the fattening stage, with an estimated weight accuracy of up to 98.5%; the precision feeding system dynamically adjusts feeding strategies based on daily weight data, optimizes the feed-to-meat ratio, supports healthy pig growth, and enhances resistance to viruses.
For immunization, a smart immunization injector is provided. An externally connected ear tag reader can automatically record the immunization time and vaccine type for each pig, making immunization data traceable throughout the process. From precision nutrition supply to standardized, digitized immunization, the intelligent system builds a two-layer disease prevention and protection barrier for the herd, both internally and externally.
Five. Digital traceability: Establishing a closed-loop system for emergency response to disease outbreaks
Efficient traceability and rapid delineation of contaminated areas are central to responding to African swine fever outbreaks. Traditional paper records are fragmented and easily lost, making them inadequate for rapid emergency response. 拉塞特畜牧云 integrates data across all dimensions to create a digital closed loop of “monitoring–early warning–dispatch–response–review,” significantly improving the efficiency of outbreak response.
The platform supports viewing all production data on both computers and mobile apps, and keeps complete records throughout each pig’s lifecycle, including pen transfers, feed intake, weight, environment, and alerts. In the event of a disease risk, management personnel can quickly trace the entire chain. After the system detects an anomaly, it automatically generates a handling work order, enabling early detection and treatment and helping control the spread of disease.
Figure 4: Lasseter Livestock Cloud
Six. Industry Impact: Comprehensive Value of the Intelligent Prevention and Control System
Building on the large-scale deployment of Lasette’s full range of intelligent equipment, products such as rail-mounted vision robots and intelligent precision feeders are now widely used by leading livestock farming groups. The platform accumulates tens of millions of livestock farming data points per day on average, and the economic and disease prevention and control value of intelligent prevention has received preliminary validation from the industry.
1. The value of disease prevention and control has increased significantly.
The frequency of human-pig contact has dropped substantially, effectively mitigating the risk of human-mediated disease transmission; the probability of local outbreaks spreading has decreased significantly; balanced nutrition enhances the herd’s baseline immunity, while the incidence of various diseases and the culling and mortality rate continue to decline; dynamic environmental control reduces the occurrence of respiratory and stress-related diseases.
2. Reduce economic losses caused by disease
Early warning enables localized isolation, avoiding large-scale depopulation across the entire facility; precision feeding reduces feed waste and the risk of secondary diseases triggered by spoiled feed; as herd health improves, spending on veterinary medicines and treatment continues to decline.
3. The standardized system can be quickly replicated and implemented
The complete set of intelligent software and hardware establishes standardized management procedures that do not rely on the personal experience of senior livestock caretakers. Modular equipment is suitable for pig farms of all sizes—large, medium, and small. New pig farms can quickly replicate the complete intelligent solution, addressing uneven implementation of biosecurity standards and shortages of qualified professionals as the industry scales up, and strengthening the overall foundation for intelligent biosecurity in the pig farming industry.
VII. Industry Outlook: Long-Term Development Directions for Intelligent Disease Prevention and Control
At present, Lasseter continues to develop intelligent products: implantable temperature-measuring chips accurately detect signs of fever, addressing the limitations of visual identification of pigs with concealed fever; the intelligent cough monitor tracks respiratory abnormalities in real time and provides early warnings of diseases such as African swine fever and PRRS; intelligent manure-clearing robots and quadruped inspection robots enable unmanned operation throughout the processes of manure removal, estrus detection, and disinfection, continuously reducing personnel activity within farms and lowering the risk of transmission by carriers.
In the long term, swine disease prevention will develop into a digital-intelligence closed loop of “AI sensing and early warning—execution by intelligent equipment—cloud-based analysis—precision intervention.” As the industry transitions to standardized, industrialized farming, various robots will work together with clearly defined roles, using data models to support scientific forecasting and dynamic decision-making. Intelligent facilities will gradually become core infrastructure for guarding against major diseases. Through four capabilities—blocking transmission, strengthening immunity, early warning, and end-to-end traceability—they will build a long-term biosecurity barrier, help ease the challenge of frequent disease outbreaks, and narrow the efficiency gap with countries with advanced livestock farming.
Intelligent disease prevention is a systematic solution for the entire livestock farming cycle, not simply the addition of individual devices. As machine vision, the Internet of Things, and edge computing continue to evolve, intelligent equipment will be deeply integrated into every scenario of disease prevention and control, continuously upgrade biosecurity management, safeguard the baseline for meat supply security, and promote the high-quality, sustainable development of the swine industry.
Conclusion
Against the backdrop of African swine fever becoming endemic, traditional manual disease-prevention methods can no longer meet the demands of high-density, large-scale farming. An integrated AI + farming solution centered on rail-mounted vision robots, intelligent precision feeders, and a livestock cloud platform is reshaping pig-farm biosecurity across four dimensions: preventing human-mediated transmission, enabling early disease warnings, strengthening herd immunity, and digitalizing traceability. It is shifting disease prevention and control from “remedial action after the fact” to “proactive prevention in advance.” Continued integration of digital and intelligent technologies with farming practices will become a key path for the industry to withstand major animal diseases and sustain stable, long-term development. (Author: Han Hua)