Precision livestock farming (PLF) uses sensors, cameras, and AI to monitor individual animals at scale. It has significant potential to improve welfare by enabling early disease detection and individual monitoring.
Precision livestock farming offers genuine welfare improvements through earlier detection of health problems, more individual-level monitoring, and reduced handling stress. A dairy cow whose early-stage lameness is detected by a gait sensor and treated immediately experiences far less suffering than one who limps visibly for weeks before a stockperson notices. However, PLF also risks substituting for human observation rather than complementing it — if sensor alerts are ignored or if farmers rely on technology to replace skilled daily stock assessment, the welfare benefits may not be realised. The technology is a tool; its welfare value is determined by how the information it generates is acted upon.