Precision Solutions in Livestock Farming - Feasibility and applicability of digital data collection

ABSTRACT

Food production systems face many challenges nowadays. Concerns regarding the environmental impact of increasingly intensive production, the rising cost of inputs needed to achieve adequate yields and the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have put, and continuously put the agricultural sector in a difficult position regarding its sustainability, since even customers became conscious about them. Such external factors have affected both the animal production and the crop farming, inducing fundamental changes in these sectors, leading towards smart agriculture. Technology solutions have been increasingly experimented with and deployed to counterbalance the above. Currently, precision farming, and the use of so-called precision livestock technologies in large-scale livestock systems offer tangible, yet costly implementations to monitor and optimize yields. While pilot studies and prototypes have been widely demonstrated in the past 10 years, standard, scalable Internet of Things (IoT) based implementations are still lacking, mostly due to the complexity of the technology application. Many factors should be considered from communication protocol to protection against weather conditions to ensure that the employed IT solution can really add value to the livestock farmer at the end of the production cycle. This scoping review is focusing on the current good practices and challenges of the domain, and on appropriate data collection. Theoretical and practical factors that determine the quality of data collection and pre-processing are presented in this article, aiming to pave the road for future scalable precision livestock IoT implementation. © 2022 IEEE.