Trends in animal husbandry innovations

The Innovation Committee of EuroTier, the biennial Germany-hosted dairy, pork and poultry technologies exhibition, recently announced the gold and silver medal winners of the event’s hotly contested Innovation Awards competition. Prof Matthias Schick, the head of the Innovations Commission of DLG (the Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, or German Agricultural Society), highlights the trends that he and his colleagues noticed among the candidates they evaluated in 2020.

- Lloyd Phillips

The 80 innovations entered into Eurotier’s Innovation Awards competition last year were evaluated by 28 committee members from various countries in the EU and Middle East. The judges soon became aware of a number of trends amongst the candidates. They included a focus on optimisation in animal husbandry; increased on-farm smart solutions; monitoring of animal health and welfare; automated data collection for production; cross-linked sensor technology; automation of production data analyses; and support for decision-making. Collectively, these indicate a move towards a systemic approach to the technologies used in animal husbandry.

CRITERIA TO BECOME WINNERS

An important criterion that the Innovation Committee uses to decide which innovations deserve a medal is whether or not the technology is relevant to practitioners in the dairy, pork and poultry production value chains. Other important criteria include animal welfare, labour and energy efficiencies, environmental protection, and occupational health and safety. An innovation might improve productivity, for example, but it must also be able to meet these other criteria to varying degrees.

Today, more than 70 000 robots and other automated systems are available for carrying out mechanical functions such as milking, feeding and manure removal in dairy, pork and poultry production operations.

There is also a rapidly growing range of technologies to perform evaluative functions, such as health monitoring, oestrus detection, emissions measurements and animal identification.