Opportunities for precision livestock management in the face of climate change: a focus on extensive systems

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🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive overview of PLM technologies and their potential for GHG reduction in extensive systems, identifying research gaps in data integration and modeling.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights into how PLM can improve efficiency, reduce emissions, and access carbon markets, aiding sustainability reporting and supply chain compliance.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the role of PLM in achieving agricultural climate targets and suggests policy support for technology adoption and data infrastructure.

Precision livestock management (PLM) technologies will allow producers to learn more about the limits to production efficiency on their enterprise. From this information, producers will be able to make more assertive decisions to improve enterprise efficiencies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. PLM technologies will allow producers to access new markets and incentive programs which will increase enterprise revenue. Leveraging PLM technologies will increase the environmental sustainability of enterprises, ensuring producers retain social license to operate. Future software will need to be capable of integrating the multiple data streams being produced to maintain on-property financial and environmental resilience. Climate change and carbon neutrality have become key topics in extensive livestock industries in recent years as mankind attempts to meet its commitments to restricting global warming (United Nations, 2015). Initial impressions are that extensive livestock systems involving low cattle stocking rates over large rangeland areas are inefficient and produce more greenhouse gases (GHG) per harvested animal compared with intensive systems. Extensive livestock enterprises are often located in dry geographical areas with increasingly inconsistent rainfall, making them vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Huang et al., 2017). Changing and more variable climates require producers to adapt their management practices to remain sustainable and increase enterprise resilience (Rust, 2019). In these environments, understanding the relationship between nutrient availability and animal performance is vital. Key constraints to mitigating the effects of climate change in extensive livestock enterprises are the sheer scale of operations, their low input management strategies, and the logistical inability to collect production and environmental data on a regular basis. However, the advent of the precision technology revolution has provided a wide range of opportunities to capture high-value data in these extensive livestock enterprises. This is being realized in intensive livestock systems (González et al., 2018) and cropping enterprises (Shafi et al., 2019; Oliveira et al., 2020) but is yet to reach its full potential in the extensive livestock sector. Advances in the genetic potential of beef cattle, and the incorporation of Bos indicus breeds, have extended the reach of beef enterprises into more marginal agricultural regions. The question now remains how we can utilize these cattle to generate profits for producers from these highly variable rangelands through precision livestock management (PLM) while at the same time conserving this fragile ecosystem. Subtropical and tropical grasslands account for a substantial portion of the world’s available arable land. Humankind must continue to improve sustainable food production systems to feed the world’s projected 9.8 billion people by 2050. Our objective is to identify the major advances in PLM technologies that allow mankind to achieve this outcome. PLM is not a new concept. It has allowed the beef producer to progress from being paid dollars per head, to dollars per kilogram carcass weight, and from locating cattle via the sound from a cowbell to the use of Global Positioning System (GPS). Although PLM has developed over time and greatly increased productivity in intensive livestock systems, the next generation of PLM technologies, such as on-animal sensors (i.e., “smart-tags”), off-animal sensors (i.e., walk-over-weigh), and remote sensors (i.e., satellite imagery), will provide opportunities for extensive livestock industries to significantly increase the granularity of data and allow management decisions to be based on a greater diversity of more informative descriptors of production efficiency. Reductions in labor requirements also cannot be discounted. PLM technologies provide livestock enterprises with high-resolution and high-frequency data streams which are currently difficult or unrealistic to obtain in extensive systems. PLM technologies also exist for the physical management of cattle in extensive systems. Commercially available management options include automated drafting, virtual fencing, and drone mustering. These technologies are also likely to be beneficial through labor reductions. However, in this article, we focus on technologies that increase the granularity of production system information to inform management decisions. Berckmans (2017) suggested that PLM technologies will deliver increased efficiency and sustainability in livestock production while also improving welfare outcomes and enabling traceability of product along the supply chain. Despite slow progress over the last decade, demand-led innovation has seen the formation of numerous AgriTech businesses that supply PLM products into the extensive livestock marketplace, suggesting a potential period of industry emergence and maturation. A developing market exists for PLM technologies in mitigating the impacts of climate change in extensive livestock enterprises. Government organizations and industry bodies are increasingly developing policy that moves toward carbon neutrality (Alves et al., 2017; Slade, 2018; Red Meat Advisory Council, 2020). These policies either incentivize carbon reduction or penalize GHG emissions. PLM technologies can lead the way under both incentive and penalty scenarios through improving production efficiencies, automating access to carbon abatement schemes, or increasing market access through validating climate positive livestock products. PLM technologies allow for objective and more frequent observation of traditional performance measures. Using PLM technologies, there is potential for producers to know the location of their livestock (Bailey et al., 2018) or be alerted during dog predation events (Manning et al., 2014) using GPS. Producers can measure how their livestock are performing using walk-over-weigh or partial-weigh technologies in real time (Menzies et al., 2018; Cantor et al., 2020), and any disruptions to performance can be investigated using accelerometers to assess physical activity which may be indicative of disease (Tobin et al., 2020), birth events (Chang et al., 2020; Fogarty et al., 2020), or even to monitor rumination behavior (Wolfger et al., 2015) and predict feed intake (Greenwood et al., 2017). Supplementary data streams that provide environmental information are also available for integration (Fogarty et al., 2021). For example, multispectral imagery can estimate the amount of available forage at varying spatial resolutions (Handcock et al., 2016), and weather station mesh networks can provide information to predict pasture growth at the sub-paddock level and alert producers to risk periods for heat stress. Past the farm gate, on-animal sensors can provide information on the impact of extreme heat or cold events during transport and lairage (Rashamol et al., 2019). These technologies are a reality now, and commercial devices are becoming available for incorporation into extensive livestock enterprises. The greatest value from PLM technologies will be realized when combinations of data streams across a property and supply chain are leveraged to inform decision-making. Research is yet to generate models that could be incorporated into commercial platforms, but increasingly, authors are noting their potential (Tedeschi et al., 2021). Through analysis and predictive modeling, integrated PLM data streams could provide producers with an information-dense online interface that offers real-time data pertinent to maintaining a high-efficiency enterprise, thus reducing GHG emissions. PLM data streams with interpretive modeling could monitor, forecast, and validate livestock productivity and feed base availability at a sub-paddock level. These data would inform day-to-day management, accurately estimating viable stocking rates and providing rapid alerts where interventions such as paddock movements or supplementation are required to maintain sustainable levels of productivity. Forecasted production data could also alert producers when livestock are approaching exit weights, ensuring producers are not penalized for missing specification or maintaining livestock unnecessarily. The removal of individual animals not achieving production specifications from extensive beef production enterprises will assist with enterprise profitability. Using the phenotypic data captured through whole-of-system and supply chain monitoring, producers could select for highly efficient and resilient livestock within their enterprise. These data could also be incorporated into genetic evaluation platforms to progress the genetic potential of the national herd. Traits that are difficult to capture in extensive enterprises such as reproductive performance could become easily accessible, and new traits, specific to PLM technologies, such as grazing distribution preference would become available (Bailey et al., 2006). In effect, the incorporation of PLM technologies into extensive enterprises will provide producers with the opportunity to assess whole-of-system performance and use the captured data for benchmarking, identifying GHG emission inefficiencies, and increasing enterprise resilience. Livestock systems are responsible for approximately 15% of the global GHG emission (Gerssen-Gondelach et al., 2017). Abatement programs provide opportunities for producers to increase income through management and measurement of carbon emissions and sequestration within their enterprise. One example of this is offered through the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) in Australia (Clean Energy Regulator). The ERF’s beef cattle herd management project incentivizes high-efficiency livestock production through regular monitoring of livestock growth rates and comparison to a standard growth rate (Department of the Environment and Energy, 2017). The method emphasizes the production of faster-g

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfab065first seen 2026-08-02 17:54:07