Precision livestock farming (PLF) is a set of electronic tools and methods used for the management of livestock. PLF involves automated monitoring of animals to improve their production/reproduction, health, welfare, and impact on the environment. PLF tracks large animals, such as cows, "per animal"; however, it tracks smaller animals, such as poultry, "per flock", wherein the whole flock in a house is treated as one animal. Tracking "per flock" is widely used in broilers.
PLF technologies include cameras, microphones, and other sensors for tracking livestock, as well as accompanying computer software. The data recorded can be either quantitative or qualitative, and/or address sustainability.
Goals
PLF involves the monitoring of animals, or the use of objective measurements on the animals, using signal analysis algorithms and statistical analysis. These techniques are applied in part with the goal of regaining an advantage of older, smaller-scale farming, namely detailed knowledge of individual animals. Before large farms became the norm, most farmers had an intimate knowledge of their livestock. Moreover, a farmer could typically trace an animal's pedigree and retain other important characteristics. Each animal was approached as an individual. In the past three decades, farms have multiplied in scale, with highly automated processes for feeding and other tasks. Consequently, farmers are forced to work with many more animals to make their living out of livestock farming and work with average values per group. Variety has become an impediment to increasing economies of scale.
Using information technology, farmers can record the attributes of each animal, such as pedigree, age, reproduction, growth, health, feed conversion, killing out percentage (carcass weight as a percentage of its live weight) and meat quality. Animal welfare, infection, aggression, weight, feed and water intake are variables that today can be monitored by PLF. Culling can be done on the basis of reproduction values, in addition to killing out percentage, meat quality, and health. The result of incorporating this technology into large-scale farming is a potentially significantly higher reproduction outcome, with each newborn also potentially contributing to a higher meat value.
In addition to these economic goals, precision livestock farming supports societal goals: food of high quality and general safety, animal farming that is efficient but also sustainable, animal health and well-being, and a small ecological footprint of livestock production.
Economic livestock farming
Due to academic studies, the requirements of an animal are well known for each phase of its life and individual physical demands. These requirements allow the precise preparation of an optimal feed to support the animal. The requirements are oriented on the required nutrition – providing more nutrition than required make no economic sense, but providing less nutrients can be negative to the health of the animal.
Quality and safety
Economic goals are an important factor in livestock farming, but not the only one. Legal bodies (such as the government and industrial bodies) set quality standards that are legally binding to any livestock producing company. In addition, societal standards are followed.
'Quality' in this context includes:
the quality of used ingredients
the quality of animal keeping
the quality of the processes
One example for issues with quality of ingredients is the (nowadays often illegal) use of meat and bone meal for ruminant animals.
Ecological livestock farming
Selecting the "right" ingredients can have a positive effect on the environment pollution. It has been shown that optimizing the feed this can reduce nitrogen and phosphorus found in the excrements of pigs.
Tools
PLF starts with consistently collecting information about each animal. For this, there are several technologies: unique ID, electronic wearables to identify illness and other issues, software, cameras, etc.
Each animal requires a unique number (typically by means of an ear tag). This can be utilized through a visual ID, passive electronic ID tag or an active electronic ID tag. For example, at birth, the farmer selects "Birth" from the menu on the reader, after which the interactive screen requests the user to read the tag of the mother. Next, tags are inserted in the ears of newborns and read. With this simple action, important information is recorded, such as: Which animal is the mother, How many animals were delivered, What the sex of the animals is, A date of birth.