Precision livestock farming technologies use sensors, cameras and AI to monitor individual animals continuously, enabling earlier detection of health problems and more personalised welfare management.
Precision livestock farming offers genuine and significant welfare benefits by enabling earlier, more accurate detection of health problems and behavioural changes that indicate suffering. The traditional welfare monitoring model - a farmer walking through a shed twice daily - misses many early signs of illness. PLF sensors monitoring continuously can detect the subtle changes in movement, feeding, vocalisation and social interaction that precede clinical disease by days. Early intervention means less suffering and faster recovery. However, welfare improvements from PLF technology depend entirely on farmers acting promptly on the data generated - sensors that generate alerts that go unresponded to provide no welfare benefit.