Precision farming technology, which uses sensors to help manage farm operations, is at an early stage of adoption in livestock production. Recent advances in cost, quality of equipment, machine learning/cloud-based systems and the fact that skilled farm labor is becoming more difficult to find are factors that have generated additional interest from livestock producers. One feature most precision livestock farming capabilities share is the ability to operate continually without regular human intervention. That allows farm staff to monitor individual animals and focus on activities such as administering treatments or assisting in maternity instead of routine tasks like pen watching. Reviewed in this article are various aspects of precision livestock farming technology and the perceived impact on livestock health and farm labor for dairy and swine farms.

The robot takeover of farm labor inched forward in a big way this week as researchers unveiled a prototype of a machine that's able to perform a task once possible only with the human hand. A team of engineers at the University of Cambridge have developed a robot that can maneuver so deftly that it's able to pick up a lettuce head, find its outer layer of leaves, and delicately remove them. The machine is able to perform this task using three tools: a camera to size-up an individual lettuce head and find its stem, an arm to roll and position the lettuce for tearing, and another arm with a suction device on the end for removing leaves. "When you harvest a lettuce, the outer leaves of the lettuce need to be removed before the lettuce is ready to go into retail," said Luca Scrimeca, one of the researchers, in a statement. "The leaves are soft, they tear easily, and the shape of the lettuce is never a given." The technology was developed by the university's Machine Intelligence Laboratory, and it's currently able to perform full leaf removal about 50% of the time and in about 27 seconds.

A worker picks substrate-grown strawberries at the Driscoll's Inc. facility on the McGrath Ranch in Watsonville, Calif., on Sept. 19, 2016. Buoyed by an inexpensive migrant workforce, California has been the United States' agricultural mainstay for nearly a century, currently producing about 60 percent of the nation's fresh produce. But as the state's minimum wage approaches $15 an hour and competition from a growing Mexican economy mounts, producers face unprecedented operating costs and a workforce that has dropped by 60 percent since the 1990s. Add to this President Trump's moves to restrict immigration, which threatens to significantly curtail the sector's already depressed labor supply. Leading California-based growers like Driscoll's Berries and Taylor Farms are feeling the immediacy of Trump's executive orders, as millions of dollars of specialty crops are growing right now that will require a workforce to pick them at the end of the season. Together they spend over a billion dollars on labor each year.