HealthyFarm: providing a Precision Livestock Farming solution within the process of digital transformation in agriculture

Digital technologies can support farmers in providing safe, sustainable and quality food and improving their working conditions. The Healthy Farm project foresees the creation of an animal welfare assessment methodology that includes both measurements on animals and on the farm environment by means of innovative IoT – Internet of Things - devices. In South-Tyrol the welfare control of animals is a significant problem, especially in inaccessible areas. The project provides for a close and active collaboration between three actors, ORMA Solutions, Eurac Research and Padua University, collaborating in the development of an advanced precision livestock farming (PLF) solution, which considers to (i) optimize an existing algorithm to infer wellness of animals from their behavior and rumen motility, (ii) identify the sensing technologies and the solutions that will need to be developed in order to (iii) have the final PLF solution applicable to the most common types of dairy cow and cattle farming (e.g. loose housing, pasture, etc).Unbalanced diets fed to ruminants, with particular reference to cattle, frequently cause metabolic disorders, characterized by altered rumen motility and digestive system dysfunction, which lead to a drop in productions and sometimes even to death. The continuous detection of some physiological parameters will allow the prevention or therapeutic intervention in the early stages of disease, thus improving the healing rate and reducing health care costs. The solution that is created during the project will be sized on the specific case of dairy and beef cattle farms, and can then be extended at the end of the project to other types of farms. Collection and analysis of data is essential to allow the further development of the PLF system and, at the end of the project, it will allow to identify the benefits of this solution and to extend its applicability to other farming systems. In addition, the platform created (based on open source standards) will be made available to other SMEs initiatives to allow the development of further applications for precision farming (or Smart farming) and to implement the strategy of European policy context regarding the process of digitization in agriculture