(2)INESC TEC - CTM
The ability to feed a growing population, which is expected to reach around 9.7 billion people by 2050, while minimising environmental impact, preserving human health, and addressing society’s rising concern over animal welfare, is currently a huge challenge. Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) is potentially one of the most powerful developments amongst several interesting new and upcoming technologies with the potential to revolutionise livestock farming systems.
The primary goal of PLF is to make livestock farming more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable, through the observation, interpretation of behaviours and, if possible, individual control of animals. Adopting PLF to support management strategies, may lead to the reduction of the environmental impact of farms (Schillings et al., 2021). PLF technologies are designed to support farmers in livestock management by monitoring and controlling animal productivity, environmental impact, as well as health and welfare parameters, in a continuous real-time and automated manner (Berckmans, 2014). PLF can be defined as: “the application of process engineering principles and techniques to livestock farming to automatically monitor, model and manage animal production”.
The aim of PLF is to manage individual animals by continuous real-time monitoring of health, welfare, production/reproduction, and environmental impact. This means that PLF technology has the potential to measure and analyse every second, on a 24/ 7 basis, encompassing the full chain: from feeding to the consumption of animal-related products. Farmers can get a warning when something goes wrong, with the PLF system alerting to the animal(s) that require care at a given moment. The monitoring can be done via different types of sensors, including cameras and microphones, as well as sensors around or on the animal. The value and potential of the information is most evident when acquired data is processed in real-time. This is already a reality in top poultry pavilions, where animals are continuously monitored and housing conditions are monitored at the smallest details (ventilation, temperature, humidity, feeding and water lines, etc…).
Literature shows the potential of the application of PLF in farms, leading to a reduction of greenhouse gasses (GHG) and ammonia (NH3) emission, nitrates and antibiotics pollution in water bodies, phosphorus, antibiotics and heavy metals in the soil. If we consider precision feeding, for example, this will allow an increased digestive efficiency and, consequently, a decrease of nutrient loss (being methane in the case of ruminants, of N and P excretion in the case of pigs). Practical applications of precision feeding, particularly in terms of individual feeding, can have a major impact on the sustainability of production systems. It provides almost immediate and tangible benefits in swine production, for instance. Recent studies show that feeding individual animals with individualised diets reduces lysine intake by more than 25%, feeding costs by about 8%, nitrogen and phosphorus excretion by almost 40%, and greenhouse gas emissions by around 6% (Remus et al., 2019).
PLF technologies have many potential areas of application: feeding strategies, welfare, health and reproduction management. Genetic selection also has much to gain from this high throughput information, with genotyping being much less limiting today than large-scale phenotyping of traits of husbandry interest. However, most technologies focus on intensive farming systems and are still relatively rare in extensive farming.
The usefulness of continuous monitoring of the many possible associated variables entails the automated processing of significant amounts of acquired standardised data and opens new possibilities with regard to production methods. Strategic harnessing of data processing, artificial intelligence and computer learning technologies will be critical to fully exploit the potential of PLF (ATF, 2020).
If properly implemented, PLF can (1) improve, or at least objectively document animal welfare on farms; (2) reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and improve environmental performance of farms; (3) facilitate product segmentation and better marketing of livestock products; (4) reduce illegal trading of livestock products; and (5) improve the economic stability of rural areas. However, there are still only a few examples of successful commercialisation of PLF technologies (Berckman, 2017). The integration of PLF into the industry requires: (1) establishing a new service industry; (2) verifying, demonstrating and disseminating the benefits of PLF; (3) coordinating the efforts of different industry and academic organisations interested in the development and implementation of PLF technologies on farms; and (4) encouraging the commercial sectors to support through professionally managed product development (Banhazi et al., 2021).
The current technological reality provides exciting opportunities for the monitoring and management of environments, such as IoT technologies, low-cost and high-capability sensor devices, computer vision and artificial intelligence, especially machine learning. In the context of PLF, these can provide tools to help farmers remain competitive while meeting environmental and societal requirements and challenges. However, technology cannot be seen as a farmer replacement and applied blindly. Instead, they should provide the maximum information supporting farmers as decision-makers. The involved biological processes are far too complex to replace farmers by technology, but these offer more possibilities to save money, change farmers' lives by spending fewer working hours, and get a monitoring and management system to better approach the genetic potential of today's livestock species.
The penetration of technologies for the implementation of PLF needs to overcome farmer’s technology illiteracy and be financially accessible to the sector. Hence, the development of suitable systems needs a close collaboration between people from different sectors, scientific disciplines, and technical fields. This appears to be difficult because each actor is often focused on pursuing their own individual goals with the underlying concern of assuring their financial survival.
To bring PLF technology further into field application, increased development and testing of PLF technologies is required in real farms to implement reliable solutions. This proximity will not only enable validation of technologies, but also promote dialogue and bring sectors together. Interface structures such as INESC TEC and FeedInov CoLAB are perfect partners and actors to boost the promotion and R&D regarding PLF in Portuguese territory. By themselves, these entities represent the two main scientific areas, but their role in society also supports the proximity of farmers and technologic companies.
References
ATF, 2021. A strategic research and innovation agenda for a sustainable livestock sector in Europe. Suggested priorities for research for Horizon Europe to enhance innovation and sustainability in the livestock production sector of Europe’s food supply chains. Third White Paper of the Animal Task Force.
Berckmans, D. 2014. Precision livestock farming technologies for welfare management in intensive livestock systems. Rev. Sci. Tech. Off. Int. Epiz. 33, 189–196. doi: 10.20506/rst.33.1.227
Berckmans, D., 2017. General introduction to precision livestock farming. Animal Frontiers, Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2017, Pages 6–11, https://doi.org/10.2527/af.2017.0102
Schillings, J., Bennett, R. and Rose, D.C., 2021. Exploring the Potential of Precision Livestock Farming Technologies to Help Address Farm Animal Welfare Front. Anim. Sci., 13 May 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fanim.2021.639678
Remus, A., Houschild, L., Corrent, E., Létourneau-Montminy, M. and Pomar, C., 2019. Pigs receiving daily tailored diets using precision-feeding techniques have different threonine requirements than pigs fed in conventional phase-feeding systems. J Anim Sci Biotechnol 2019 Feb 22;10:16.; doi: 10.1186/s40104-019-0328-7.
Banhazi, T.M., Lehr, H., Black, J.L., Crabtree, H., Schofield, P., Tscharke, M. and Berckmans, D., 2021. Precision Livestock Farming: An international review of scientific and commercial aspects. Int. J. Agri.c & Biol. Eng., Vol. 5 No.3, 1-9.