The future of livestock farming will be the backdrop of larger farms and less human labour.

There is an ever-increasing need for technology to fill this gap, coupled with increasing demands from consumers and processors around animal health and welfare.

There is no doubt technology will come to the rescue and aid farming of the future. In this article we look at some of the current technology and what some of the future advances might look like.

Robotic milking

We all know more robots will be milking cows, but they will also be generating a huge amount of data about the cows that visit them.

This data will flow into a central computer to generate algorithms which then will leave the farmer with decisions to make.

There are several robots on the market, the exciting stuff seems to be coming from milk data generated at each visit.

The robot of the future will alert to heat, accurate cell count monitoring and even metabolites, which indicate the health status of the cow.

This type of milk technology will not just be owned by the robot though, but inline milk analysis or MIR mid infra red spectrometry will help farmers make decisions around individual cows in any parlour.

This may be linked into feeding systems, which could prevent cows getting very sick by identifying nutritional stress before it turns out to be fully blown metabolic stress.

It is very possible also that much of our pregnancy diagnosis will be done automatically in the dairy cow by measuring progesterone hormone in milk.

Automated milk feeders

These are already on a lot of dairy farms and can be set up to a feeding programme for your dairy calves.

They also provide real-time data around feeding frequency and amounts which can be used as indicators of calf health.

Pneumonia prevention

A lot of large feedlots have started using temperature tags as an individual warning system.

These tags will be inserted in the ear and regularly take the animal’s temperature. When it is over a certain temperature for a period of time, they begin to flash a warning to farmers.

This can pick up sick calves up to 24-48 hours before typical symptoms may appear.

With any infection early intervention allows better treatment outcomes. Some farms will routinely just use an anti-inflammatory for the first treatment.

On farms where pneumonia is a risk, particularly where animals are being purchased in, these tags have a role in early disease detection and possibly reduction in antibiotic usage.

A virtual stethoscope called the ‘whisper system’ is another piece of kit designed to automatically score lung sounds into categories, which may impact on treatments and decisions for farmers in remote locations.

Thermal imaging may also prove useful in the future to measure and detect high temperatures in animals.

A bio-tattoo is a tattoo that can change colour based on temperature or certain disease identification.

Data and algorithms

Farms are already generating animal-based data which when interpreted over time can help monitor animal health and performance.

Data is not valuable unless it is collated and put into algorithms that convert it to usable real-time information for farmers.

Data must be simple to interpret and probably be on our phones.

Anything that automatically removes data can ease this process, eg automatic scales, electronic tags, milk recordings, etc. The next big challenge is the sharing and using of this data to create real-time alerts systems.

Data will be key for farms of the future, data flow and ownership might create challenges.

Also with data required from different systems, having compatibility and collation in one platform may be one of the biggest challenge we face.

The smart shed

With animals indoors the environmental conditions have a huge impact on disease.

With variable weather could come the shed that adjusts to weather conditions to create consistency in the environment of the animal.

It will not only regulate the environment, but it will also probably regulate movement around the shed through drafting gates. The smart shed will push up and deliver feed using robots saving labour.

The shed sensors will also need to be connected to cow-related sensors. There is also technology like BCS cameras, which can be strategically placed to record and monitor herd BCS.

Wearable technology sensors

Every second person is now wearing a Fitbit to track their steps, we all know of collars for cows which also track a number of health parameters.

Most will measure standing, walking, lying and rumination, which are extremely important because we know how a cow likes to normally spend her day.

Small biosensors will be more commonplace on farms of the future.

The wearable technology of the future is likely to get smaller, cost-effective, more flexible and be solution focused (giving real-time answers and actions for farmers).

This is often termed as precision livestock farming and this refers to sensors taking information from animals and relaying them to a software system.

Once the system knows what’s normal, it can create alerts for any abnormalities. The modern farm will probably have animal and environmental sensors which talk to each other.

Calving cameras of the future will probably detect calving signals in cows by visual recognition.

Bio-sensors take readings from the body, for the dairy cow this will usually be from milk, and things like cortisol can be measured as a real-time indicator of stress.

There are rumen boluses (rumen sensors) which can measure things like Ph and temperature.

These boluses can also monitor movement and any time we can measure movement we can also perform heat detection.

There is a real opportunity in the future for any technology system or sensor which looks at time budgets of individual cows.

We know what a cow wants, but if we can alert to lying times, etc, we can make better decisions around cow comfort.

Point of care testing

These are on-farm tests that farmers, their vets and advisers might be using. These can give real-time information about animals around disease and metabolic testing.

While there are many single tests commercially available, the potential for testing using PCR means multiple diseases may be able to be tested on-farm quickly in the future.

Facial recognition AI

This is a new and exciting area where cameras track animal behaviours and create what is a real-time virtual stockman.

Like all other technologies it uses normal behaviour and then algorithms look at when this behaviour changes to act as an early problem detection.

Cows standing too long, cow not eating, cows that are lame – all data that can be generated. Some farmers will know animals individually, but with scale this does change often.

The future of animal recognition software will bring back that individual animal behaviour-monitoring perhaps.

Drones for herding

In outdoor grazing systems drones may be the stock people of the future, with the ability to use thermal imagery and other parameters to monitor stock on expansive grazing farms.

Will they also be able to move flocks, herds and isolate sick animals? Possibly.

Genomics

The genome is an extremely complicated map of an animal’s genetic potential. Creating this genetic map for a species is incredibly detailed and complicated.

We now have the genome of the cow mapped. By monitoring genomics we can make better breeding decisions around animal health.

Gene editing may be the future for some animal health and disease issues – where we remove or add parts of the genome to make the farming animals of the future more adaptable and healthy.