Farm 4.0: innovative smart dairy technologies and their applications as tools for welfare assessment in dairy cattle.

Abstract The growing world population has increased the demand for meat and milk products and has led to a rapid growth in the scale of cattle enterprises globally. As a result, livestock production would intensify even more with farmers aiming to maximize output per animal unit and it would lower the stockperson per animal ratio. This will result in less time available to monitor and manage individual animals properly, jeopardizing animal health and welfare. The recent advancement in technological and engineering tools and materials such as advances sensors and sensing devices, and data processing and machine learning methods provide effective tools for the dairy industry to control qualitative and quantitative parameters related to dairy cattle health and welfare. This review paper will (a) explain smart dairy technologies, (b) describe on-farm cattle welfare assessment, and (c) discuss sensors applied in automatic cattle welfare assessment.