Smart Agriculture Trends & Market Outlook

Smart Agriculture Industry Trends

When African Swine Fever Strikes, Outdoor IoT Becomes the New Defense Line for the Pig Farming Industry

In October 2025, a suspected case of African swine fever (ASF) was reported in Taichung, leading to the preventive culling of 195 pigs and Taiwan-wide bans on transport and slaughter, sending shockwaves through the pig farming industry and the consumer market. With Taiwan's pork self-sufficiency rate as high as 87.5%, a spreading outbreak would not only threaten food safety but also hit an industry chain worth more than NT$100 billion. ASF is aggressive and highly contagious, and the virus can survive in frozen pork for up to 1,000 days. There is currently no cure, and Taiwan has not approved the use of any vaccine…

What Exactly Is African Swine Fever? Can It Spread to Humans? The Complete Biosecurity Guide Every Pig Farmer Must Know

In August 2018, an invisible storm quietly struck Liaoning Province, China. Within just a few months, the outbreak led to the culling of more than a million pigs, plunging the entire Asian pig farming industry into unprecedented panic. This was the impact of African swine fever. As a practitioner who has long followed smart livestock farming, I have seen too many pig farmers caught off guard because they didn't understand this disease, and I have also witnessed how farms with sound disease prevention stood firm through the outbreak. Today, I'd like to explain in the simplest, most practical terms what African swine fever really is, whether it can spread to humans, and how we should respond…

How Precision Livestock Farming Forms the First Line of Defense Against Swine Fever - IoT Technology for Early Warning of African Swine Fever

When an animal epidemic strikes hard, the pig farming industry needs not only a rapid response but also the ability to "know in advance." African swine fever (ASF), one of the most devastating infectious diseases of pigs worldwide; although Vietnam has approved domestically produced live attenuated vaccines since 2022, international concerns about their safety remain, and Taiwan has not approved their use, so disease prevention still relies solely on biosafety. Fortunately, as Internet of Things (IoT) technology is put into practice on livestock farms, Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) has become a key weapon for detecting outbreaks early. PLF uses sensors, cameras, and algorithms to build an around-the-clock health monitoring system for pigs…