Iberian pig — the PDO demands a record per animal, and that record lives in five different notebooks.

The problem

Five events per animal, five islands, and an individual record that exists only in the swineherd's memory.

A quality Iberian lot crosses five events per animal — and on most operations, each one lives in a different place:

1. Tagging and breed certification — the ear tag is applied at the farm of origin and the breed certification (100% Iberian, 75%, 50%) goes into the official livestock registry.
2. Entry into the dehesa — the initial weighing at the start of the montanera; usually jotted down in a notebook or on a scale that talks to nothing.
3. Montanera days — kilos gained on acorns and grass; the difference between bellota, cebo de campo and cebo is decided here.
4. Departure to the slaughterhouse — final weighing, slaughter, cutting. The animal record almost always breaks at this jump.
5. Drying house and sale — the ham is identified by a PDO band or seal; getting from the seal back to the individual animal is, in many houses, impossible in any reasonable time.

The veterinarian, the swineherd and the cooperative's quality manager know this — but nobody can be on the dehesa, at the scale and on the slaughterhouse dock at the same time. When the PDO inspector asks for the record of animal X, someone rebuilds it by hand cross-referencing notebooks and spreadsheets. The classic system (paper + eye) works 99% of the time — that 1% is what fails in the audit, and a lot disqualified by the PDO outweighs the entire traceability investment.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN Tracer is not yet another farm system — it seals the cracks between the ones you already have.

The Iberian problem is not a lack of data: the livestock registry, the scale, the swineherd's notebook, the slaughterhouse ERP and the PDO seal have the information. The problem is that it lives in five heterogeneous islands and the individual animal record exists in no system — only in the swineherd's memory. Tracer is the filler that seals those gaps, without asking you to change the registry, the scale or the slaughterhouse ERP.

Edge reads the RFID ear tag at every checkpoint. Connect captures notebooks, old scales and the slaughterhouse ERP. The agent stitches the five events into one record per animal, ready for inspector and buyer. The person signs.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to the PDO Iberian pig:

• Edge — a vision-equipped terminal with an RFID reader at the fixed points (scale, chute, slaughterhouse dock). It verifies that the physical ear tag crossing matches the expected animal, records the weight and triggers an alert on any deviation. It works without a network — on the dehesa, coverage comes and goes, and Edge keeps operating with its own light.
• Connect — captures the swineherd's notebook (photo + transcribed voice), the old scale's ticket, the official livestock registry and the slaughterhouse ERP, whether they arrive as an exported spreadsheet, a paper ticket or a modern API. And it captures from outside whatever arrives by WhatsApp from the veterinarian or by email from the buyer, at second zero.
• Agent — stitches the events per ear tag into an individual animal record with its weighings, its montanera days and its breed grading. It generates the PDO dossier and the export dossier without rebuilding anything by hand. If a weighing deviates or an event is missing, it raises a flag and alerts the quality manager. The person signs.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Iberian traceability with notebooks vs. an animal record with iLEAN Tracer

Aspect	Notebooks + scale + slaughterhouse ERP	With iLEAN Tracer
Individual animal record	Exists in the swineherd's memory	Exists as auditable data per ear tag
Ear tag ↔ carcass ↔ PDO piece link	Broken at the jump to the slaughterhouse	Held by RFID + Edge on the dock
Dossier for the PDO inspector	Rebuilt by hand, days	Generated per animal and per lot, ready
Montanera days per animal	Estimated from the litter average	Actual, per ear tag
Operation without coverage on the dehesa	n/a	Edge and readers keep operating offline
Passport for buyer / export	Batch summary sheet	Animal record with photo and signed events

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your lots and your estates. We put it forward so the board has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Iberian pig operation with 800-2,500 head on montanera, 2-3 estates and a contracted external slaughterhouse, 100% bellota and cebo de campo grading.
• Tracer pilot on one estate + the scale + the slaughterhouse dock (RFID readers + Edge on the dock + Connect against the livestock registry, the swineherd's notebook and the slaughterhouse ERP). First value expected within a few weeks.
• Indicative payback between 5 and 9 months, depending on the number of annual lots and the average cost of a documented PDO incident in recent years.
• The hard lever is a single lot defended in inspection with an animal record per ear tag instead of a summary sheet. Expected reduction in indexable incidents ≥ 30%.

And the cooperative quality manager's reasonable doubt

“What if the AI gets confused and crosses one animal's ear tag with another animal's carcass?” — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. In tasks where the AI merely reads an RFID ear tag and cross-references it with the livestock registry, the best models brought error below 1.5%^[1]. And even so, what is critical is never decided alone: Tracer raises the flag and the person signs. The three rings exist precisely for this.

^[1] OpenAI paper “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.