Precision livestock farming (PLF)

Abstract

The world population keeps growing and in several big countries the diets are changing since more people can afford to eat animal products. The result is that the worldwide demand for meat and animal products might increase by 40% in the next 15 years. A question is how to achieve highquality, sustainable and safe meat production that can meet this demand. At the same time, livestock production is currently facing serious problems, such as animal health in relation to food safety and human health. Europe wants improved animal welfare and has made a significant investment in it. At the same time, the negative environmental impact of the livestock sector is far from being solved. Finally, we must ask how the farmer, who is the central stakeholder in this process, will make a living from more sustainable livestock production. One tool that might provide real opportunities for practical implementation is Precision Livestock Farming (PLF). PLF systems aim to offer to the farmer a real time monitoring and managing system based on continuous monitoring of the animals by using modern technology. This is fundamentally different from all approaches that aim to offer a monitoring tool without improving the life of the individual animal under consideration on that moment in the process. The idea of PLF is to provide a real-time warning when something goes wrong so that immediate action can be taken by the farmer. Continuous, fully automated monitoring and improvement of animal health, welfare, yields and the environmental impact becomes a reality. The first objective of this paper is to show several examples of PLF systems that are operational today in about 60 compartments/barns for pigs, broilers and cows all over Europe. We give details of which variables these systems measure in real time in a fully automated way. Moreover, we show how in the running EU-PLF project (EU-PLF) the real time data analyses can generate added value for the farmer. PLF systems can replace the ears and the eyes of the farmer and work 24 h a day and 7 days a week. The second objective is to give ideas on how the farmer gets an advantage from these PLF systems as we start to see that within the EU-PLF project. Collaboration between so called ‘animal people’ (physiologists, veterinarians, ethologists, animal scientists, etc.) and ‘technical people’ (bio-engineers, software and hardware engineers, ICT people) is needed to make these systems to become successful support systems for farmers.