The Institute of Agricultural Economics (AKI) is going to participate in a two-year-long project, „Enhancing environmental sustainability of livestock farms by removing barriers for adopting ICT technologies (LivestockSense)”, funded by ERA-NET COFUND ICT-AGRI-FOOD and National Research, Development and Innovation Fund. The project will assess the acceptance and applicability of information and communication technology (ICT) based tools in pig and poultry farming.
Utilisation of modern, ICT-based tools as a support of precision livestock farming (PLF) in animal husbandry has both economic and environmental reasons. However, the promotion and adoption of such kinds of technologies face challenges Europe-wide in the animal husbandry sector.
The project, which gained the support of the European Union, aims to identify/remove social barriers for technology adoption to achieve a wider use of ICT on farms. This will be achieved by selecting and supplying a number of farms in the partner countries with sensors and special cameras which are able to monitor the environmental condition of livestock buildings and the bodyweight of the animals. Thus, they provide continuous and real-time measurement data to the management of the farm. The researchers in the project will assess how the information by the new technology can be utilized in the everyday life of the farms. Furthermore, learning datasets and AI-based models will be developed and integrated into a decision support tool, which allows pig and poultry keepers to quantify their individual economic and environmental benefits if using PLF technologies.
In the consortium of seven participating countries, Hungary has been represented beside the consortium leader AgHiTech Ltd. by AKI. Our institute will be responsible for the development of the project portal, which, in addition to the dissemination of project information, will supply an open-source, data-driven web-based application and freely available API to measure the environmental performance of individual livestock farms and to support green financing efforts. Furthermore, AKI will play an important role in designing and carrying out social research, based on mixed social science methods, to identify the limitations of PLF technology application.
The Kick-off-Meeting of the project will be held in July 2021.