Project Active
LivestockSense - Enhancing environmental sustainability of livestock farms by removing barriers for adopting ICT technologies
Contact: Prof. Uri Marchaim
Emails: uri@migal.org.il
Website: https://livestocksense.eu
October Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/
Information and communication technology (ICT) has made major advancements in the world. A division of ICT is Precision Livestock Farming (PLF). It includes monitoring on commercial farms. Monitoring can improve building environment and reduce pollutant emissions, thus improving social acceptance of intensive livestock production. Utilisation of such PLF tools may also encourage farmers to improve environmental viability of farms, animal nutrition and health/welfare, as well as product uniformity. Therefore, PLF can (1) maximise production efficiency, (2) increase product quality, (3) improve animal health & welfare, (4) reduce human occupational health & safety risk and (5) mitigate pollutant emissions from livestock.
Today's changing environmental conditions threaten food and feed production. In order for the European Union to be independent of climate changes and become internationally competitive by 2050, it is important that PLF become a part of animal production. Although it can improve animal production, farmers on pig and poultry farms have yet to accept these new technologies for lack of knowledge and because of socio-economic and cultural barriers. Thus, the main goal of LivestockSense is to increase the use of communication technologies, while identifying and removing social barriers that reduce their adoption.
LivestockSense has two main goals, 1) to improve the sustainability of livestock farming on the economic, environmental and social level and 2) to strengthen governmental efforts to encourage farmers to use ICT to facilitate automatic monitoring of production. LivestockSense will create a more open-minded attitude among the farmers towards new technology on commercial farms.
The LivestockSense project in Israel will concentrate on broiler farming in the Galilee region, in collaboration with “Loole Of HaGalil”. It will examine the use of advanced ICT systems in poultry houses in the Galilee region, the attitude of farmers towards the installation of new equipment and the use of new ideas, such as that of Decision Support Systems (DSS) and thermal cameras.
This project has eight partners from Hungary, Estonia, Austria, Israel, Poland Denmark and Sweden and is to be conducted over a two-year period. It is funded in each country by the local Ministry, after being approved by the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020 (ERA-NET COFUND - ICT AGRI FOOD), Proposal ID: 40490.
In Israel the project is funded by the “Israeli Innovation Authority" under the Grant No. 72520.
