Application of Intelligent Technologies in Farm Animal Disease, Feeding and Building Environmental Control

A special issue of Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472). This special issue belongs to the section "Farm Animal Production".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 636

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
College of Veterinary Medicine, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou 450046, China
Interests: cow; goat; veterinary medicine; animal health; disease warning; intelligent diagnosis; image recognition

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Guest Editor
Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences(CAAS), Beijing 100081, China
Interests: smart livestock farming; animal health surveillance and early warning; automated phenotyping of livestock; livestock behavior recognition

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Guest Editor
Institute of Animal Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100193, China
Interests: ruminant nutrition; intelligent agricultural equipment; precision agriculture; rumen microbiota; extracellular vesicle

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Traditional livestock farming has long faced problems regarding inaccurate environmental control (lagging regulation of temperature, humidity, and harmful gases), a dependence on manual experience for disease prevention and control (leading to high misdiagnosis rates and strong lag), and low feed utilization rates (with waste rates averaging 15%–20%), resulting in low production efficiency, reduced economic benefits, and intensified environmental pollution on farms. The application of intelligent technologies provides technical support that makes it possible to accurately identify the physiological states of individual animals (such as their heart rate, body temperature, and rumination frequency), to regulate breeding environments in real time (by linking ventilation and temperature control systems), and to construct disease warning models.

This Special Issue aims to highlight impactful research and commentary with a focus on using intelligent technologies to improve farm production efficiency and resource utilization, to ensure animal health and welfare, and to build sustainable ecosystems. It will fully embrace inter- and trans-disciplinary studies from multiple disciplines (e.g., animal disease, animal nutrition, environmental sciences, and artificial intelligence).

Research articles will cover a broad range of farm animals including cows, goats, sheep, swine, poultry, and other farmed animals. All types of articles, from original research to opinions and reviews, are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Liqiang Han
Dr. Shuqing Han
Dr. Xuemei Nan
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • animal disease
  • animal feeding
  • environmental control
  • smart livestock farming
  • intelligent agricultural equipment
  • animal health surveillance and early warning
  • image recognition
  • livestock behavior recognition

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 3131 KiB  
Article
An Improved Model for Online Detection of Early Lameness in Dairy Cows Using Wearable Sensors: Towards Enhanced Efficiency and Practical Implementation
by Xiaofei Dai, Guodong Cheng, Lu Yang, Yali Wang, Zhongkun Li, Shuqing Han and Jifang Liu
Agriculture 2025, 15(15), 1643; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture15151643 - 30 Jul 2025
Viewed by 402
Abstract
This study proposed an online early lameness detection method for dairy cow health management to overcome the inability of wearable sensor-based methods for online detection and low sensitivity to early lameness. Wearable IMU sensors collected acceleration data in stationary and moving states; a [...] Read more.
This study proposed an online early lameness detection method for dairy cow health management to overcome the inability of wearable sensor-based methods for online detection and low sensitivity to early lameness. Wearable IMU sensors collected acceleration data in stationary and moving states; a threshold discrimination module using variance of motion-direction acceleration was designed to distinguish states within 2 s, enabling rapid data screening. For moving-state windowed data, the InceptionTime network was modified with YOLOConv1D and SeparableConv1D modules plus Dropout, which significantly reduced model parameters and helped mitigate overfitting risk, enhancing generalization on the test set. Typical gait features were fused with deep features automatically learned by the network, enabling accurate discrimination among healthy, mild (early) lameness, and severe lameness. Results showed that the online detection model achieved 80.6% dairy cow health status detection accuracy with 0.8 ms single-decision latency. The recall and F1 score for lameness, including early and severe cases, reached 89.11% and 88.93%, demonstrating potential for early and progressive lameness detection. This study improves lameness detection efficiency and validates the feasibility and practical value of wearable sensor-based gait analysis for dairy cow health management, providing new approaches and technical support for monitoring and early intervention on large-scale farms. Full article
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