Smart Livestock: Current Status and Trends of Smart Livestock Development in China

During the 14th Five Year Plan period, China's animal husbandry industry, as a pillar industry of agriculture and rural economy, is transforming towards intelligence through new technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and AI. Smart animal husbandry breaks through bottlenecks such as monitoring the breeding environment and disease prevention and control, promotes the upgrading of traditional breeding to technology and standardization, and injects strong impetus into the high-quality development of animal husbandry and rural revitalization. The 14th Five Year Plan period is a crucial five-year period for China to comprehensively promote rural revitalization and accelerate the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. It is also an important five-year period for the transformation and upgrading of animal husbandry, improving quality, efficiency, and competitiveness. The modernization of animal husbandry is the vanguard and compass of agricultural modernization.

The new generation of information technology represented by artificial intelligence is accelerating the transformation and upgrading of animal husbandry towards a technology-based and standardized industry. Smart animal husbandry, as a typical application solution of smart agriculture, has been widely researched and practiced.
China is a major country in the animal husbandry industry, with a total livestock output consistently ranking among the top in the world. Its development plays an extremely important role in the national economy. As an important component of agriculture, animal husbandry has gradually grown from a household sideline to a pillar industry of the agricultural and rural economy, with sufficient production capacity and a relatively complete quality and safety guarantee system.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs pointed out in the "2018 Key Points for Animal Husbandry Work" that "promoting the modernization of animal husbandry in agriculture is a major responsibility of animal husbandry to help 'agriculture become strong'; In 2020, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on Promoting the High Quality Development of Animal Husbandry", which clearly proposed to accelerate the construction of a modern breeding system and enhance the informationization level of animal husbandry; In 2021, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs formulated and issued the "14th Five Year Plan for the Development of the National Livestock and Veterinary Industry", proposing that by 2025, significant progress will be made in the modernization of the national livestock industry, with dairy cows, pigs, and poultry farming taking the lead in achieving modernization.
The healthy development of the animal husbandry industry relies on smart animal husbandry supported by information technology and intelligent technology to provide new solutions, break through the core key technologies of animal husbandry, and achieve environmental protection, healthy animal husbandry, and sustainable development of the animal husbandry industry.
In other words, the application of new generation information technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence in smart livestock systems is the development trend of animal husbandry.
core technology
The new round of information technology revolution represented by the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence is driving the transformation of extensive traditional animal husbandry into knowledge-based, technology-based, and modern intelligent animal husbandry. Utilizing technological advantages has become an important factor driving the rapid development of animal husbandry. The Internet of Things technology provides a data foundation for smart animal husbandry. The Internet of Things in animal husbandry is a monitoring network composed of a large number of sensor nodes, which collects real-time information on the growth status and breeding environment of livestock and poultry through information sensing devices. It uses wireless sensor networks/local area networks and wide area networks to achieve heterogeneous and real-time online data transmission, providing rich data for smart animal husbandry and laying the foundation for intelligent analysis. Cloud computing and big data technology are important means for intelligent analysis of livestock data. Livestock data has typical big data characteristics of multi-source, heterogeneous, cross platform, and cross system. It is very difficult to process such data using traditional technology, and independent and dispersed farmers cannot provide corresponding computing power. Cloud computing provides technical support for livestock big data processing, with core technologies including knowledge representation and modeling based on multimodal features, domain oriented deep knowledge discovery and prediction, and knowledge fusion condensed from the universal mechanism of specific domain features. The core driving force behind the new round of livestock industry transformation is artificial intelligence, which includes multiple core technologies such as machine vision, speech recognition, virtual reality, and wearable devices. It can be integrated and applied to livestock production and management processes from multiple perspectives, transforming traditional feeding management methods, improving production management efficiency, and reducing labor costs.
Current situation and trend
The rapid and rational use of scientific and technological means to effectively monitor the livestock and poultry breeding environment is the primary requirement for smart breeding. Taking pig farming as an example, a large number of scientific experiments and production practices at home and abroad have shown that environmental factors account for 20% -30% of the impact on pig production, involving monitoring of temperature, humidity, light environment, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, and other aspects. With the development of sensors, mobile communication, and Internet of Things technology, obtaining environmental parameters through sensors, transmitting them to the cloud, and displaying them on information terminals such as mobile phones, PDAs (handheld computers), and computers has become a widely used information-based management method in large-scale and standardized breeding farms. How to scientifically and effectively utilize the large amount of monitoring data obtained to further guide livestock production is a prominent issue that urgently needs to be addressed. The breeding environment represented by pig houses and three-dimensional chicken houses has the characteristics of multivariate coexistence, complex structure, and high density, which brings many difficulties to establish accurate regulatory analysis models. Relevant research in China has made certain progress. The use of modern identification technology to assist in the management of individual identity throughout the entire lifecycle is a common issue in the development of modern animal husbandry. It is a prerequisite for achieving behavior monitoring, precise feeding, disease prevention and control, and food traceability. It is also an inevitable requirement for realizing intelligent production of livestock and poultry. In the traditional animal husbandry model, common techniques for livestock and poultry identification include spraying, ear trimming, ear tags, and collars. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, biometric technologies such as facial recognition, iris recognition, and posture recognition have begun to extend to animal husbandry, injecting New Energy into the development of smart animal husbandry, making the establishment of individual health records and tracking and warning of life status more intelligent. It is worth mentioning that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has made significant progress in the identification of livestock and poultry in China. It can not only be integrated into ear tags and collars, but also researchers are exploring the development of miniature implantable RFID chips in order to obtain real-time identification information of livestock and poultry through faster means. Although the above technologies have made significant research progress, there are still practical promotion problems such as high maintenance costs and complex operations in animal husbandry, which have led to their current lack of large-scale application. Therefore, the development of a new generation of intelligent individual identity identification technology that is cheaper and more convenient to operate will be the future trend.

The prospect of precision feeding technology for individuals is broad. Precision feeding is mainly aimed at the precise breeding of medium and large livestock such as pigs, cows, and sheep, including facilities and instruments such as feeding stations, automatic weighing, automatic grouping, and feed residue monitoring. Intelligent precise feeding technology combines nutritional knowledge with breeding technology, accurately calculates the precise feed demand based on individual physiological information of livestock through scientific calculation methods, and uses instructions to activate the feeder for feeding, thus achieving personalized timed and quantitative precise feeding according to individual physical conditions, dynamically meeting the nutritional needs of livestock at different stages. This type of technology is an integrated application based on individual identification of livestock, multidimensional data analysis, and intelligent control. Although the construction cost of breeding equipment is relatively high, the economic benefits are significant and have broad application prospects. The demand for intelligent technology centered on animal husbandry safety is urgent. With the changes in animal husbandry models and ecological environments, as well as the acceleration of world economic integration, the epidemic situation of animal diseases closely related to the development of animal husbandry has undergone significant changes. From initially affecting animal health and damaging the healthy development of animal husbandry, it has gradually expanded to various aspects such as animal product quality and safety, public health and safety, environmental safety, international trade, social stability, and bioterrorism. In particular, major animal diseases have posed a serious threat to global socio-economic and public health security. At this stage, key technologies such as the Internet, cloud computing and big data have been used for remote diagnosis of epidemic diseases. A variety of remote intelligent diagnosis and treatment systems have emerged, which can realize remote diagnosis and treatment, image diagnosis, disease control information release, product traceability and other functions. However, the lack of professional animal disease prevention and control technicians, the inability to timely connect animal husbandry and veterinary research and production, and how to transform post supervision into pre warning are still prominent issues that urgently need to be addressed.