At the Computing Conference 2018: Shanghai Summit on the same day, the company officially launched the ET Agricultural Brain, a program expected to achieve an in-depth fusion of artificial intelligence. So far the ET Agricultural Brain has already been applied to pig breeding, as well as apple and melon farming. "We hope that AI technology could help farmers and enterprises make safer, more nutritious and profitable products," Hu noted. According to Su Zhipeng, a senior researcher with Tequ Group, one of the major cooperators of Alibaba Cloud, a pig will make different sounds when eating and sleeping compared to when it's sick. The ET Agricultural Brain can judge whether a pig is sick by analyzing acoustic features and infrared thermometry.

As China's largest news network Xinhua reported, a new deal worth millions of yuan has been signed between livestock farming companies the Sichuan Tequ Group, the Dekon Group and Alibaba, China's technology giant. This united approach has the goal of identifying and predicting fertility by analysing swine behaviour. The system should be able to keep a record of every single pig, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement. The system is said to be able to help each sow give birth to 3 more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3%, according to an early-stage experiment. Tequ Group's chief information officer, Zhang Haifeng, told Xinhua: "If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes."

Alibaba, Tequ Group and Dekon group sign multi-million-dollar deal to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to China's pig farming industry.

For centuries, pig-rearing in the country was predominantly a backyard occupation. But since the 1980s, China has swiftly modernized its pork industry to meet the demands of a newly-rich middle class. Now, half of the world's pigs -- some 700 million animals -- live and die in China, most in huge farms. And to help manage this porcine horde, the country's farmers are turning to a decidedly untraditional tool: artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Chinese tech giant Alibaba signed a deal with pig farming corporation Dekon Group and pig feed manufacturer Tequ Group to develop and deploy AI-powered pig-tracking systems.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has decided to use AI technology to help China boost its pig-husbandry industry, which has long been plagued with poor efficiency and high labor costs. An AI program could help identify and predict diseases and boost fertility by analyzing swine behavior, according to an online announcement last week by Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba's cloud computing arm. Teaming up with livestock farming companies Sichuan Tequ Group and Dekon Group, the e-commerce giant has invested millions of yuan to build an AI system that can keep a record of every single hog, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement. The system is able to help each sow give birth to three more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3 percent, according to an early-stage experiment. "If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes," said Zhang Haifeng, chief information officer of Tequ Group.