Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) Systems: Improving Sustainability and Efficiency of Animal Production

Abstract

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) plays a key role in the advancement of animal housing, since it is associated with the improvement of animals’ health and welfare status, ensuring sustainability and efficiency of farms. The main objective of researchers is the development of systems for real-time continuous monitoring of the animals’ everyday lives (i.e., animal-centric tools). Such systems based on both steady-state and dynamic models should have low installation costs, be precise, accurate, easy to use and environmentally friendly and provide the farmers with valuable information serving as decision support tools for the improvement of management practices. The data could be collected within the unit by simple sensors such as accelerometers, RFID sensors, etc., or more complex computer-based vision or sound and audio analysis systems. This chapter presents various PLF systems in basic livestock (i.e., dairy cows, sheep and goats, pigs, and poultry), indicating their benefits upon the production process.