According to the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the livestock industry accounted for over €20.2 billion of production in the Spanish economy in 2020. Research at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has confirmed that this figure could significantly improve with the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence, and better control of all the procedures required in production.
A UOC industrial doctoral degree from the Network and Information Technologies program has concluded that incorporating artificial intelligence and applying it with devices, such as monitoring sensors, would optimize the livestock industry's restocking and service planning processes, leading to higher profit and reduced costs.
"Other more highly industrialized sectors have been benefiting from Industry 4.0 principles and proposals for years, but the livestock industry still suffers from a low degree of digitization," said David Raba, author of the thesis. He conducted the Research INSYLO Technologies S.L., a company specializing in the development of volumetric sensors and environmental quality.
The project specifically involved developing and installing sensors that accurately measure the amount of feed in the silos in each pig farm and designing algorithms that can achieve a more efficient distribution of feed from production plants to each farm. The study was carried out on some 500 silos on farms in the province of Girona, Spain, as well as in Wales, on the Swedish island of Gotland and in the area surrounding Manchester, England.
"Both the hardware and the software have been shown to have a positive impact on the industry, as they're both designed to show courses of action to guide decision-making aimed at improving key performance indicators, such as transport costs, the degree of use of distribution vehicles or the number of instances of stock shortages, among others," explained Ángel A. Juan, joint supervisor of the thesis and a professor and lead researcher at the Internet Computing & Systems Optimization (ICSO) group at the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and at the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications; and Rafael D. Tordecilla, a doctoral student and researcher in the ICSO research group.
The thesis also states that these technologies have been insufficiently adopted in agricultural facilities such as farms. One of the reasons for this lack of development is managers' resistance due to a lack of previous experience and deployment, as well as a lack of uptake of information systems to collect useful information on the operation and increased yield of facilities.
In fact, the greatest hindrance in the implementation of new technologies is often people's resistance to change.
