Summary

Smart livestock farming (SLF) is a convergence service in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are applied to livestock value chains. It has the potential to deliver more productive and sustainable production by integrating processes of smart farming, management information systems (MISs), stockbreeding automation and robotics to provide better decision-making or more effective exploitation operations and management of livestock value chains.

The use of Internet of things (IoT) technologies in SLF aims at providing full coverage of processes by collecting and transmitting data from the entire agroecosystem. That means SLF can establish contact with each participant of a livestock chain, providing and collecting information about their processes and increasing the possibilities for control and improvement on the efficiency of their tasks.

Recommendation ITU-T Y.4482 provides an overview of SLF based on IoT, high-level requirements for SLF and a reference model which represents a generic sequence for livestock value chains and is applicable to these chains as a whole, regardless of species or rearing techniques.