Precision agriculture uses GPS, drones, sensors, and AI to optimise crop and livestock production. Its welfare implications are mixed but generally positive for both wildlife and farmed animals.
Precision agriculture offers genuine welfare benefits across several dimensions. Reduced pesticide use benefits pollinators, invertebrates, and the birds and mammals that depend on them. Precision livestock farming enables earlier disease detection that reduces animal suffering. GPS guidance and pre-harvest drone surveys can reduce wildlife mortality in arable crops. The welfare caveat is that precision tools can also enable more intensive production — drone-guided targeted pesticide application might enable denser monocultures that were previously unviable. The welfare outcomes depend on how precision tools are directed, and whether they are used to farm more intensively on existing land or to reduce impact on the same land.