Opportunities and Challenges for Smart Livestock Production in India
Introduction
Livestock sector has an important role in nutritional and food security for expanding global population, along with nutritional and food security livestock sector plays multifaceted role in socio-economic development of rural households.Livestock sector is likely to emerge as a big agriculture based business in the coming decades. This sector is also considered as a potential sector for export earnings. Beyond food production, livestock sector also contributes in draught power, organic manure, hides, skin, bones, blood and fibers to the industrial sector. There are several challenges to this sector which hurdles in achieving any target in the future.According to changing scenario livestock production should be smart for maximum benefit and minimum production losses. Smart livestock farming is a key step to achieve the sustainable development of smart farms, but it is still in the initial stage and has broad prospects. In order to realize precise livestock production, it is necessary to speed up the popularization of intelligent technologies such as environmental control, disease early warning, precise feeding, Geofencing and remote diagnosis.
Smart Livestock Production
One of the fundamental subfields of agriculture is animal husbandry which deals with the administration, breeding, and care of the animals. But the animal husbandry practices are labour oriented and time consuming. With the help oftechnology, we can make these labour oriented process into simpler process. There are various types of wearable and implantable sensors which can detect behaviour, physiological parameters, location, reproductive cycle and bacterial concentration in milk. These tools make animal husbandry practices less labour intensive and more economical. Other sensors which detect ambient temperature and relative humidity are available which indicate animal house temperature, excessive THI sends a warning to farmer which makes them aware to take necessary action.
Working of Wearable sensors
- Monitoring of Animals
The monitoring system has many different goals, such as observing the migration patterns of wild animals and studying the grazing animals’ behaviour. It can be difficult and labor-intensive to locate grazing animals in pastureland. This method of animal husbandry is used in nations where pasture grazing is favoured to stall feeding. Sensors can be placed with animals and information can be gathered from these sensors.
- Detection of behaviour
The analysis of the health and nutritional status of the animal is made possible by the behaviour that sensors can detect. The information gathered by sensors can be used by farmers to make decisions, such as the number of fence violations, preferred grazing locations and times, and the animal activity hours and transit times.
- Geofencing
By using GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, a technique known as geofencing allows software to be triggered when an animal enters or exits a specific area. Farmer attaches animals with includes sensors and a GPS tracking unit as part of an animal husbandry method based on a pasture system. These sensors are used to track the whereabouts of the animals. In order to create a geofence around the grazing area, geofencing uses the GPS network as well as additional tools like Wi-Fi nodes and Bluetooth beacons.
- Estrus detection
An application one of the most significant obstacles to stable and effective management is the improvement of the cow conception rate.Cows show signs of sensitivity, increased activity, restlessness, growling frequently, sniffing other cows, and refusing to be mounted by other cows during the proestrus phase, however during the estrus phase, cows are regularly moving around and ready to be mounted by other cows.
- Vaginal sensors
A wireless insertion sensor can be used to measure vaginal temperature, and the results indicated a strong association with rectal temperature. These sensors not only measure temperature but also assist in determining the precise time of calving. Traditional calving requires farmers’ attention and frequent verification of whether parturition has begun or not, therefore calving time prediction is virtually impossible.
- Measurement of Physiological variables
To count the movements, the animal monitoring device can be put into the leg of the cow. During heat stress (HS), the cow produces less milk with the same nutritional input, increasing the farmer’s production expenses. With increasing stress, an animal’s body temperature and respiration rate also increase. A variety of sensors are used to identify changes in body temperature, pulse, and heart rate in animals that indicate stress.
- Disease Detection
Animals might become ill for a number of causes. It is impossible to check on every animal in a herd every day. The animal’s illness is contagious, making it potential for other animals to contract it and die if it is not discovered in time.In order to solve this problem and find an automotive technique of animal health monitoring, we move towards automatic sickness detection.
Challenges for smart livestock production
Economic Efficiency
In livestock economics, one of the most important characteristics is a low rate of profit of an investment project, which presents many risks from natural conditions. The benefit–cost of a new technology seeking deployment in livestock should be carefully calculated to ensure a trade-off between the cost of technology implementation and the profit potential. The system initializing cost include purchasing of wearables and hardware.The system operating cost includes service registration cost and the cost of labour to manage smart devices.
Technical Problem
Large-scale IoT device deployments for smart agriculture might conflict with various network architectures, particularly with IoT networks using low spectrum bands like ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Sigfox, and LoRa.Interference can degrade system performance as well as reduce the reliability of IoT ecosystems. IoT networks that use cognitive technology to reuse unlicensed spectra increase the cost of the device.
Conclusion
Smart livestock production is a fascinating term which requires mixture of technology and economic input, mostly livestock rearers of India are small scale, marginal and landless so they cannot afford such expensive technologies, however government subsidy can promote smart livestock production for small and marginal farmers.
Dr. Anmol Pareek, Assistant Professor, RPS College of veterinary Sciences, Mahendergarh
Dr. Aditi Gupta, PhD Scholar, F.V.Sc&A.H, SKUAST-Jammu
