Review on application of Internet of Things technology in animal husbandry in China

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) technology, based on the perception, is developing rapidly and permeating into every walk of life. IoT of agriculture, including animal husbandry, has been showing a status of rapid development and is urgent in keeping pace with other industries. In this study, livestock coding specification and identification technology, remote monitoring technology of livestock farm environments and animal behaviors, and precise sow feeding equipment and digital network management platform of farms were reviewed to expound the application effects and limitations of IoT in animal husbandry. We found that at the perceptual layer, the international standards for livestock identification mainly included the ISO TC 23/SC 19, which set rules for radio frequency identification (RFID) for livestock management, and it was functionally divided into ISO 11784, ISO 11785 and ISO 14223. The Chinese standards for livestock identification were described in three levels: national standard specifications, local standards, and corporate standards. For example, the three different standards are Ministry of Agriculture Legislation No.67, local standard of identification in Shanghai (DB31/T341-2005), and Xinjiang (DB 65/ T3209-2011), and internal encoding specification of Beidahuang Agriculture Co., Ltd and Yiliyuan Co., Ltd. At the transport layer, the environment parameters of livestock farms like temperature, humidity, illumination intensity, ammonia concentration, and carbon dioxide concentration etc., and animal behavior parameters like body weight and body temperature would be perceived by different sensors and then the data from environment parameters and individual animal behavior data mentioned above would be remotely transferred through a wireless public network (2G/3G/4G). The video data and huge production process data were transferred into internet network databases by wired networks. At the data application layer, the typical application examples were shown below. Firstly, remote monitoring, data collection, and transmission of breeding environment parameters or animal production data were realized by using an intellectual mobile terminal to analyze and give early warning of the collected data. Then, the system will selectively turn on or off the remote intelligent environmental control equipment (draught fan, light, heater, and water pump etc.) based on the analysis results. The second example was the construction of a cloud-computing platform of cow-breeding farms and pig-breeding farms-that is, production data of hundreds or thousands farms were collected by network databases and data was cloud-stored as well as cloud-analyzed in the form of formal meta data, and the platform would give farmers warning information based on the analysis of production and breeding database by data mining technology. The third example was the development and application of automatic electro-mechanical feeding control systems of lactating sows, which was composed of electro-mechanical systems, wireless network technology, mobile SQL Lite network database, electronic data interchange, and feed intake prediction models of lactating sow nutrient requirements. This paper also analyzed the deficiencies of animal husbandry's IoT in technology, product, application, related policies, and people's cognitive from microcosmic to macrocosmic aspects, and suggestions were given based on the above deficiencies. Above all, the modernization development of animal husbandry needs the support of the IoT and IoT in turn is urged to accumulate its positive energy and promote itself better through applications in the different technological fields.