Modern Animal Breeding and Digital Technology
While once considered only an option, integrating (digital) technologies into animal breeding is now essential for effectively building breeding programmes, animal health and welfare, husbandry, and genetic improvement.
As the livestock sector faces societal, environmental and political challenges, it must find solutions to address the growing pressures of climate change and evolving consumer demands. Consumers are becoming more informed about their food, driving the need for transparency and sustainability in production practices. The need for innovative approaches in animal breeding has never been more important. By integrating digital technologies with current animal breeding methods, such as precision livestock farming (PLF), Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we can improve animal breeding strategies, ensuring outcomes that are sustainable, efficient, and ethical.
The Evolving Landscape of Animal Breeding
Historically, European animal breeding has relied on traditional methods for collecting information and data, while giving more weight to production traits and other observable traits (for example udder health, eggshell colour and coat/feather colours). From the 18th to the late 20th century, breeding emphasis was put on traits like growth rate, meat yield and milk yield. After various wars and other challenges, farmers had to prioritise animals with highly economically valuable traits to secure their livelihood and ensure food security. However, over the last 25 years (Figure 1), there has been a shift towards balanced and responsible breeding.
Breeders still use conventional breeding, but now integrate them with other tools from the breeder’s toolbox, such as genomic selection and marker-assisted selection. This modern approach includes considering additional traits to reduce environmental impact and improve animal health and welfare. It also takes into account the changing needs of the European and global food systems, which is part of modern animal breeding strategies. This shift further calls for integrating new technologies, such as digital farming, to improve the precision and robustness of the collection and integration of information for sustainable breeding and farming systems.
Integrating Digital Technology into Animal Breeding Practices
Digital technologies offer a wide range of opportunities to the livestock sector. For example, sensor-based systems provide real-time data on animal health, behaviour and production quantity and quality. Breeders have already started integrating these technologies into their breeding programmes, such as Radio Frequency Identification tagging (RFID) to monitor individual animals or automated milking systems that can collect data on milk quality. However, the potential of these technologies can be further maximised for the sector’s benefit.
Fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors is crucial to bridge the gap between research and implementation. A multidisciplinary approach that combines modern animal breeding techniques with advanced digital tools is essential to fully realise these benefits.
Sustainable Animal Breeding: Pigs
Pig Breeding companies integrate advanced digital technologies like artificial intelligence and innovative data acquisition systems to improve pig breeding, focusing on robustness, longevity, and sustainability. These technologies enable precise data collection and analysis, improving genetic selection and animal welfare. Programs like GNXbred utilise real production data from crossbred animals to improve breeding decisions, ensuring better health and productivity. This approach not only boosts biological performance but also aligns with evolving market demands and legal requirements, promoting a more sustainable and efficient pig production system. Read PICs blog “Innovative technologies for robust animals and sustainable production” to learn more about sustainable pig breeding.
Sustainable Animal Breeding: Cows
Digital technologies, combined with modern ruminant breeding techniques, are ensuring a sustainable livestock sector. Innovations such as precision livestock farming (PLF) tools, including electronic sensors, GPS-based animal care, and robotic milking systems, enhance efficiency and animal welfare by providing real-time data and automated management solutions. These technologies enable farmers to monitor health, optimise feeding, and improve breeding practices, reducing environmental impact and increasing productivity. By integrating these advanced tools, the dairy and beef sectors can achieve a more sustainable and resilient sector, ensuring a balance between economic viability and environmental stewardship. For more information read this post from ALL ABOUT FEED “Game-changing technologies in dairy & beef sectors awarded”.
Sustainable Animal Breeding: Poultry
Digital technologies, combined with modern poultry breeding practices, are transforming the sector. HenTrack, for instance, uses individual movement and location patterns to improve genetic selection in commercial laying hens. This innovative approach enables precise monitoring of each hen’s behaviour and health, resulting in better welfare and, then, productivity. By incorporating advanced data analytics, these technologies empower breeders to make informed decisions that foster sustainability and efficiency in the poultry sector. Find out more by reading PoultryNews’s “Hendrix Genetics supporting HenTrack research project.”
Digi4Live: Innovative Solutions for Animal Breeding Challenges
As the livestock sector continuously changes and adapts to current societal, economic, environmental and political needs, animal breeding has shifted from simply productivity to focus on traits that enable animals to thrive in diverse and evolving conditions while considering welfare. Today, breeding strategies aim to improve the sustainability production systems, improve animal welfare and reduce environmental impacts. Digital tools such as data analytics and sensor technologies are increasingly being implemented in breeding programs. This increases our ability to select farmed animals with traits that meet these complex challenges more efficiently.
However, while digital technologies are already part of breeding strategies, there is still significant potential for further innovation. Breeders are actively collaborating with experts across fields to improve those and fully use the potential of these tools. One of the major challenges is managing and integrating the huge amount of data generated by these digital technologies. Effective data management is essential to use this information for actionable insights, but it requires robust systems for storage, analysis, and integration across various platforms. Digi4Live could bring a solution to such challenges by bridging the gap between the private and public sectors, aligning breeding practices with digital advancements. By encouraging such collaboration and sharing expertise, Digi4Live contributes to the sustainability, efficacy and transparency of the livestock breeding sector.
Digi4Live: Integrating digital technologies
Digi4Live is exploring how digital technology can improve animal breeding by comprehensively re-assessing and improving current digital tools. The project will also organise workshops with stakeholders to define key phenotypes, identify potential proxies, and explore large-scale digital solutions such as electronic nests in poultry, computer vision for parentage tracking, and genomic tools. These technologies are crucial in incorporating new traits into breeding goals, providing farmers with the best animals and genetics (including germinal products). Its use not only benefits breeders but also other actors in the food chain by offering individual tracking data, contributing to greater transparency and efficiency. Digi4Live is also focused on defining relevant ontologies and metadata for data acquisition, ensuring that these innovations can be implemented effectively on a large scale.
Paving the Way Forward
Integrating digital technologies into animal breeding is essential for the future of livestock management. By embracing digital tools and innovative data management strategies, we can better expand our breeding goals for a more sustainable, efficient, and adaptable strategy that overcomes modern challenges. Digi4Live is an example of this comprehensive approach, offering benefits not only for breeders and farmers but for the entire food production chain, leading to more resilient, robust and ethical livestock systems. These advancements will help improve the sustainability, efficiency, and profitability of animal farming, ensuring that the livestock sector is prepared to meet the challenges of the future.
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