A review on beef cattle supplementation technologies

Abstract

The increase in the worldwide population reflects the expansion of beef cattle production and exportation. Although pasture is the world’s primary feed source of cattle food, failures in pasture management can endanger the productivity of beef cattle. An option for reducing the issues brought on by a shortage of nutritional resources and maintaining the fodder pasture is to perform the supplementation process on the livestock, even being one of the most costly activities in animal management. To decrease expenses and the need for labor to supplement the herd and improve animal performance, many parameters directly associated with supplementation must be monitored, such as environmental climate, soil and pasture characteristics, animal welfare, weight, and health. With so many parameters that impacts the decision on the quality and quantity of supplement to be supplied to the herd, sensors, remote sensing, and agricultural machinery are essential. The joint usage of these technologies in the supplementation process is complex, and there is a gap in decision-making systems for dynamic supplementation. Therefore, this work aims to carry out a comprehensive literature review that characterizes the main technologies related to the bovine supplementation process, mapping the main processes that involve the use of technological tools in the most diverse application domains. Finally, we propose a new Internet of Things architecture focused on the cattle supplementation process that combines technologies to compose a dynamic supplementation decision-making system capable of estimating the quantity and quality of the supplement that the herd needs in the presence of changes in the environment, pasture, and animals’ conditions parameters to reach production targets.