Vision Technology and Cattle Breeding: The continued rise of Agri-Technology to improve breeding

Matthew Dobbs BVM&S, Cert CHP, DipLaw, ARAgS, MRCVS, Veterinary Surgeon, Lawyer and CEO, Agsenze

“Its motion was so swift, complex and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine”. Written over 125 years ago, these immortal words of HG Wells are as real today as they were in the turbulent era of their Victorian author. While these words were penned at a time of great mechanical development, with the awe and might of industrialised humanity, they spoke of an age where “machines” would dominate all of human existence.

In an act of Nostradamus-like prophecy, Wells correctly identified the rise of ‘machines’ that dominate our 21st Century existence. Whether today’s ‘machines’ are the servants of mankind, or humans are now subservient to a fully mechanised world, there is no hiding from the inexorable rise of technology in our lives. From our homes to transport, work to pleasure, we are so utterly engrossed in technology, in a way that even our Victorian forebears could not have imagined!

There can be no more controversial interface than between technology and the health & welfare of animals who produce our food, with consumers questioning any system that implies an over reliance on technology and “factory farming”. However, technology is now vital to the production of our food and will help drive the efficiency required by the same consumers and help mitigate the environmental impact of ruminant agriculture. But what technologies will producers find most useful in the breeding of cattle in the future?

Over the last one hundred years cattle breeding has benefitted from a number of technological advances. 2026 marks the 90th anniversary of the first co-operative organisations in Artificial Insemination and today this technology is the mainstay of most dairy fertility programs. In more recent years, oestrus detection has been revolutionised by ‘wearable” accelerometer technologies, helping to correctly identify oestrus, reducing calving intervals and improving pregnancy rates. Now, new technologies based on vision systems and integrating the other AI – Artificial Intelligence – are bringing new improvements in bovine fertility, by identifying individual cows with health challenges and allowing herd level assessments of ration and cow management.

Government Encouragement of Ag-tech adoption?

In 2013 the UK Government, under the 2010-2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, released a statement (1) claiming the UK would become a world leader in agricultural science and technology, following the launch of the Agricultural Technologies strategy. The aim was to deliver sustainable, healthy and affordable food for future generations.

In recent years, the Agricultural Act (2), passed in November 2020, set out a new legislative framework for a new subsidy regime in England – hoping to lessen the impact of the loss of EU subsidies and set the agenda for a new agricultural evolution. Aiming to encourage land stewardship, production efficiency and animal welfare, the strategy endeavours to achieve public goods from public funds. For UK livestock producers, this policy has a clear aim – to support the adoption of new technology on UK farms, which on average have been falling behind both our European neighbours and our global competitors in production efficiency.

The policy also aims to bring sustainable intensification to agricultural production, as not only does this help to address the growing in-efficiency gap between our domestic producers and their global competitors but also helps to mitigate the negative environmental effects of livestock production. Technology enabled production emits significantly less GHG emissions (3) per kg of milk/ meat produced than production relying on less precise production based on human subjectivity.

Production intensity and environmental mitigation appear to be inextricably linked; sustainable intensification may not be a choice but an absolute need, as part of a wider response to global warming. Clearly abstinence from milk and meat consumption would also reduce the current negative impacts of ruminant GHG emissions, but with a growing world population, aspiring to a protein rich diet, is it sensible for individual nations to ‘sacrifice’ their livestock farmers on the ‘altar’ for the environmental benefit, especially if the adoption of technology could help achieve the same outcome.

Improved breeding by embracing technology?

In recent years UK farmers have been hit by a number of cuts to their ‘investment capital’. In addition to the cuts in subsidies, global warming influenced weather conditions and energy inflationary pressures, have resulted in additional challenges for all livestock farmers. Input volatility has forced producers to focus on efficiency in production, in non-capital intensive ways. Rising herd and flock sizes, adding more animals per farm, and advances in genetics, breeding ever-more productive animals, provides quick and cheap solutions to productivity. But without concomitant technological intensification, (and with a decline in human based husbandry driven by farm labour shortages), these solutions do not address the same consumers concerns that their food has been reared ethically, sustainably and with high welfare standards.

As in any commercial operation, the key is to build your product as cheaply as possible, to keep the cost of goods (COGs) as low as possible. For livestock farming read fertility: the key to efficiency! Darwinian dynamics mean that for all animals, breeding success must not come at the detriment of personal survival and therefore looking after oneself is number one priority. For cattle, as for all livestock species, body condition is essential for breeding success on the farm.

Producers currently rely on visual observation, human recording and manual reporting of all the key health and welfare traits, including BCS and mobility. This clearly has its drawbacks – time consuming, subjective, low repeatability, labour intensive, with a large margin of error when applied to large scale herd health monitoring. Even with highly skilled professional farm staff there is inevitable human error paired with the constraints of busy farm management, that can lead to cases only getting picked up later in their disease process. Looking at the herd ‘day in-day out’ may also blind producers to the insidious changes of declining outcomes.

Tracking Body Condition Score (BCS) of their herd can help monitor performance: BCS is a major indicator of metabolic performance in dairy cows and directly related to fertility performance and health traits. Vision technologies, such as HerdVision (4), which utilises a 2D and 3D camera system to monitor BCS, will result in financial returns due to improvement in cow heath and fertility, less premature culling and saving on feeding costs.

The best new vision technologies supporting cattle breeding by tracking BCS changes utilise:

• 3D cameras (with 2D images) to ensure body volumetric measurements to millimetre accuracy
• Edge computing, where images are processed locally on the camera/farm which allow immediate reporting of outcomes to the user
• Local systems, avoiding over reliance on internet connectivity which can be challenging in rural farming environments
• Low data transfer modes, allowing technologies to be deployed in buildings, in yards and at pasture, where 4/5G and low-data satellite broadband systems can be used
• System integrations that share data seamlessly via API with the existing farm management systems and other third-party technologies
• Low-cost hardware, that can monitor a large number of cattle through a single platform
• Individual cow outcomes to provide management recommendations on a ‘per cow’ basis, while also utilising actual and virtual group averages to support herd level management advice
• Large Language Models which report outcomes in clear, human style communications

Cattle Mobility Technology

The effect of lameness on cattle fertility is well recognised (5). Lameness is considered to be one of the top beef (6) and dairy cattle (7) health and welfare challenges, although there is notable variation between farms (0-80%), the average prevalence is estimated to be around 1/3 of all cattle. Interestingly, a study in 2013 (8) noted that almost 70% of the dairy farmers expressed an intention to take action for improving dairy cow foot health. Possible barriers to the farmers taking action were labour efficiency, a problem that has only got worse, and the lack of a clear demonstratable effect of achieving an improved dairy cow foot health following intervention.

Cattle have a stoical nature and naturally mask the signs of pain. This introduces further bias and subjectivity and using only human observation to identify lameness and picking up cows in more advanced stages of pain, may not be the most effective solution. Therefore, vision technologies that can pick up earlier lameness, will save on labour and help to bring improvements to health and production outcomes, including breeding success. By keeping cows healthy, productive and fertile ‘more of the time’ means we need less animals for the same level of production, mitigating livestock farming’s long shadow over the environment and saving many tonnes of CO2 each year.

Artificial Intelligence

Nothing is more talked about at the moment than Artificial Intelligence! Artificial intelligence clearly has many applications in science and innovation but the ‘big problem’ in agriculture is ‘joined up’ data, where quality, consistency and accessibility is essential. ‘Ground truth data’ that is objective, free from bias, repeatable and consistent is needed to ‘train’ systems and provide that evidence based approach. Ensuring that the data that the Artificial Intelligence has ‘learnt’ from allows the information to be of high quality and integrity of the source data is essential.

There are a number of areas where agriculture struggles to achieve quality data collection and the best new Ag-tech companies ensure data preparation, data processing during model training and data quality monitoring post launch, are given the highest priority. This is where data and animal scientists must all work together. Veterinary professionals with a background in medical and clinical interactions, alongside knowledge of animal welfare and the physiology of efficiency, provide another integral link, to ensure the best Ag technologies are ‘fit for purpose’.

But simply training outcomes on human interventions won’t be enough and the best Ag-tech providers are coupling AI ‘machine learning’ and deep neural networks to ensure that producers and the animals under their care benefit. Therefore, having an AI model with high sensitivity is important, as with any other test in a medical setting. Bringing ‘learned’ human oversight (aka, trained animal scientists/veterinary professionals) to training all new Artificial Intelligence Ag-tech systems is the only way to ensure their success. Finally, the data must be communicated through human style communications and bespoke, not generic, large language models are now being used by the best Ag-tech providers.

Vision Technology will be the key Ag-tech solution for cattle in the future

Vision Ag-tech is developing quickly, with new functionality and accuracy of algorithms bringing a new level of insight on cow behaviour and production metrics. Systems already exist that can undertake advanced husbandry procedures, such as reading ear tags and predicting future fertility performance. With the cost of hardware reducing and the opportunity to monitor a whole herd using a few low-cost cameras, both in housed and pasture situations, then vision technology will become an essential technology for the next generation of dairy producers.

References

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/160-million-technology-boost-for-uk-agricultural-industries

2. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/agriculture-subsidies-after-brexit

3. M.C. Bianchi et al. March 2024. Can Technology Mitigate the Environmental Impact of Dairy Farms? Cleaner Environmental Systems. Vol 12

4. https://herd.vision

5. J.I. Alawneh et al. November 2011. The Effect of Lameness on the Fertility of Dairy Cattle in a Seasonally Breeding Pasture-based System. The Journal of Dairy Science. Vol 94, Issue 11.

6. J. Tunstall et al. March 2019. Lameness in Beef Cattle: UK Farmers Perceptions, Knowledge, Barriers, and Approaches to Treatment and Control. Frontiers in Veterinary Science. Vol 6.

7. https://ahdb.org.uk/knowledge-library/lameness-in-dairy-cows

8. M. Bruijnis et al. July 2013. Dairy Farmers’ Attitudes and Intentions towards Improving Dairy Cow Foot Heath. Livestock Science. Vol 155