The HF RFID system developed in this study can be used to measure
feeding patterns of growing-finishing pigs in a commercial or
simulated commercial situation. A correlation between number of
RFID registrations and feeding duration was found, but specific
behaviours such as lying down while feeding or standing next to
the trough without accessing the feed might impair this correlation.
Overall performance of the RFID system is dependent on the
time window sizes used to compare with video observations and
varies with pig, tag and the number of tags per pig. Many of the
RFID registrations that occurred outside of feeding visits were close
to actual feeding visits. With an achievable sensitivity of 88.58%
and specificity of 98.34%, the HF RFID system performed well in
registering the feeding visits of the pigs.
The system presented here has good potential for measuring
feeding patterns of individual growing-finishing pigs in commercial
pig houses, for research purposes, or for detecting latent problems
with pigs. For defining feeding pattern variables, such as visits
and meals, further work is needed to find the optimal criteria to
cluster the RFID registrations. For detecting health, welfare and
production problems, however, monitoring of the raw RFID