Abstract
The increasing demands for the consumption of animal products made livestock production one of the main areas of interest worldwide. However, inefficient management of livestock farms has as a result an increase of financial loses, lack of traceability and environmental impact. Lately, precision livestock farming combined with the intelligence that information technologies can offer, is being proposed as an effective solution for the improvement of livestock farm management. The aim of the present study is to architect and develop a software platform for the Management of Livestock Farm, which will lead in profitable farm management and resource savings. The software is developed within the cloud architecture of ‘GAIA Epiheirein’ which is specifically optimized for agrifood services. Thirty small ruminants’ farmers were interviewed and every need and activity of the farm was recorded in detail. Following that procedure, the smart management application was designed and implemented accordingly. The application is monitoring the current status of the farm providing information for each animal (ear tag number, genealogical data, health status, growth rate), production stage, reproduction information, stocking density, farm population, ration data, supplier information. Daily, monthly and annual reports on feed intake, feed conversion ratio, milk production and analysis, production cost, statistical data and correlations between similar farms and automatic alerts on supply needs, upcoming diseases, reproduction and notification on daily tasks on farm are being created. Transferring all the farm related information to the cloud enables inter-farm statistical reporting and business intelligence services provision, therefore enabling the optimization of farm management.