Emerging technologies are transforming livestock welfare monitoring from periodic snapshot assessment to continuous, individual-level welfare intelligence.
The future of livestock welfare monitoring is continuous, automated, and individual-level rather than periodic, manual, and group-level. Technologies that currently exist in research settings will become commercially viable at farm scale within this decade. Building regulatory frameworks that embrace these technologies while ensuring they drive genuine welfare improvement rather than merely creating data will determine whether the technology revolution translates into welfare improvement at scale.