A single breach can devastate an entire livestock operation. For pork producers, the threat of highly contagious swine diseases entering a barn is a cause for anxiety. It is a reality that makes rigorous preventative cleaning and strict entry protocols the bedrock of modern farmed animal management.
Enter Farm Health Guardian. Launched in 2022, the Guelph-based agricultural technology start-up builds hardware and software solutions specifically designed to help pig producers mitigate disease risks.
“We focused on pork, just because there’s a risk of animal disease transmission between farms, and the pork producers take that really seriously. They have a lot of practices, they call them biosecurity protocols, where they want to reduce the risk of disease spread between their farms, and so that’s why we started there,” said Rob Hannam, CEO of Farm Health Guardian.
One of the main tools they offer to pig producers is a technology that does real-time tracking of people, vehicles, and equipment entering and leaving commercial hog farms. The goal is to know exactly who is on a site and when they are there to reduce the risk of disease spreading.
Protocols such as cleaning trucks that transport pigs are important biosecurity measures because if pigs have disease, it could be carried to the truck.
“Each different disease has a different way it moves. Some will move in with the animals: if a sick animal or infected animal has it, and they’re moved or shipped to a different farm, they’ll, of course, bring it with them. And then when they’re in the barn with other pigs, they have contact. Think of them like kids in a kindergarten class. When your son or daughter brings home a cold from school, it’s the same idea,” said Hannam.
Despite the high stakes, many producers still track farm entries using basic tools like Excel spreadsheets. These manual logs lack a reliable verification mechanism to confirm whether a truck was actually sanitized or biosecurity protocols were strictly followed.
“What we’ve learned after establishing our company – we ran some trials or tests in 2024 and we learned two things: one is there’s more what we call breaches of biosecurity than we think, so the farm owner, or the vet, they think, ‘I think we’re pretty good, the truck is following the rules, it looks clean,’ so it’s doing what we want, but when we actually measure it, there’s way more breaches of biosecurity than people think,” said Hannam.
The second thing Hannam said he learned was how real-time feedback changes people’s behaviour.
“If we’re able to detect a breach of biosecurity during the day, in near real time, within a few minutes of it happening, and the vet or the farm owner receives a notification from our software that there’s a breach, then they can act on it. They can phone the truck driver; they can say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ They can stop it, sort of in process. But human nature, real-time feedback changes behaviour.”
Other technologies that Farm Health Guardian has include the Protocol Farm Visits app. A phone app that streamlines biosecurity by providing instant access to key property information, visit records, health status, downtime, pyramid, and other biosecurity requirements.
“That’s in use in Manitoba, and there’s hundreds of workers that would have the FarmVisits app on their phone, and we’re recording when they go to farms, not recording any other movements, just when they go to a farm property or an agribusiness location, and again that gives the veterinarian information about are they following the procedures, and that there was a disease break, they can do a trace back to see where did people come from that came to this farm? Did they bring it from a different farm?” explained Hannam.
Currently, Farm Health Guardian is preparing to launch its third product, which will be ready for the fall.
“We’re just developing hardware that actually has a door locking ability. It would be on the outside of the door of the barn, and if your vehicle or your phone app have been to a site that that has a disease and then you go to a site that doesn’t have the disease, the door will stay locked for you, because you’re not permitted to be there because you’ve been at a site that had a disease today or yesterday.”
Even though Farm Health Guardian is a Guelph-based company, their products are more successful in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the U.S. Hannam attributes this geographic divide to structural differences in the regions’ farming models.
Ontario’s industry is largely characterized by smaller, independent farms. In contrast, Western Canada and the U.S. feature massive corporate operations that are deeply interconnected, sharing the same processing plants, feed mills, and supply infrastructure.
“When there’s common links, whether that’s employees or workers or trucks, moving animals, all those links, if they’re common, then that leads to a potential vector that the disease could move, so they’re bigger farms, so there’s higher risk, and they’re more connected,” said Hannam.
The push for standardized biosecurity is part of more than a decade-long evolution in Canadian agriculture. Modern standardized biosecurity began when the Canadian Swine Health Board (CSHB) launched the National Swine Farm-Level Biosecurity Standard in the fall of 2010.
In places like Manitoba, the combination of tech tools like Farm Health Guardian and Farmers adopting stricter biosecurity measures has reduced the risk of disease outbreaks. The Manitoba swine industry widely uses the Farm Health Guardian system to track trucks and enhance biosecurity. More than 70 per cent of the province’s commercial swine farm vehicles participate.
“There’s a certain disease they were really targeting, and in 2022 there were over 100 cases of it in one year, and now in the last few years, there’s only been four cases in the past three years,” said Hannam.
The company plans to continue expanding its biosecurity technology into the poultry industry.
