Food and Fertilizer Technology Center - About

1. Rationale:

In Japan and Western countries, the number of livestock per farm tends to be large as animal husbandry is accumulated to large-scale farmers. It leads needs in developing technology to manage livestock by a small number of people. Aiming on the establishment of a labor saving and precise farming system, IoT (Internet of Things) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are utilized to develop technology for smart livestock management and various techniques have been developed including dairy farming automation and diseases detection through "visualization" of livestock health condition realized by sensor technology. To be more specific, milking robots, activities sensors, body surface temperature sensors, lumen sensors, etc. have been developed in Japan so far. We invite domestic and foreign researchers to this symposium and introduce the current state of technology development related to smart livestock management including advanced technologies in Western countries and then discuss prospects in order to contribute to the spread of smart livestock technology suitable for the Asia-Pacific region.

2. Objectives

• Share information on the state of the art research in animal husbandry and zoology;
• Provide a venue for exchange of ideas, emerging technologies and knowledge on smart livestock industry with potential applications in the Asian and Pacific region; and
• Establish collaboration in research that must be pursued at multilateral levels.

3. Major Findings and Recommendations

• Understand IoT & AI technologies as promising tools for precision livestock farming, improving animal production and welfare, and reproductive management & early disease diagnosis.
• Identify IoT sensors as an integrated decision-making support system for producers, private and government sectors in agriculture, while AI could be used for analyzing and evaluating data collected by the sensors.
• Consider the implementation cost of AI-IoT system in agricultural production value chain when promoting to farmers in the future.
• Emphasize the need for durable, reusable, and sustainable multiple-data recording sensor to replace single signal receiver sensor, which can reduce electronic waste amount and improve management efficiency.
• Strengthen R & D investments, communication between farmers and researchers, and regulation policy & strategy formulation for future IoT and AI application.

Group photo