Many people in several countries worldwide, particularly in Asia, India, and South America, are getting more financial possibilities to buy animal protein. This fact, combined with the changing diets of these people in those countries, will result in an increase of the worldwide demand for animal products (meat, eggs, and milk) of 70% by 2050. Consequently, the number of livestock is increasing, while at the same time, the number of farmers is decreasing. This results in much bigger herds per farmer. It has become impossible for farmers to follow all of their animals in a reliable way in such big groups. At the same time, several issues must be solved now in the livestock sector, such as monitoring animal health and welfare, reducing the environmental impact, and assuring the productivity of the process. Precision livestock farming (PLF) aims to offer a real-time monitoring and managing system for farmers. This is fundamentally different from other approaches that tried to monitor the animal welfare by human experts scoring animal-based indicators. These methods do not improve the life of the animal under consideration. It is nice to detect a problem after an animal has arrived at the slaughterhouse, but it is much better to detect a problem while the animal is being reared and to take immediate management action. The idea of PLF is to provide a real-time warning when something goes wrong so that immediate action can be taken by the farmer to solve the problem. To bring PLF technology further into field application, increased development and testing of PLF technologies is required in real farms to implement reliable solutions. To further develop and introduce such supporting management PLF systems, some basic principles must be respected. Copyright © 2017. . © 2017 Berckmans

The worldwide demand for meat and animal products is expected to increase by at least 40% in the next 15 years. The first question is how to achieve high-quality, sustainable and safe meat production that can meet this demand. At the same time, livestock production is currently facing serious problems. Concerns about animal health in relation to food safety and human health are increasing. The European Union wants improved animal welfare and has made a significant investment in it. At the same time, the environmental impact of the livestock sector is a major issue. Finally, it is necessary to ask how the farmer, who is the central figure in this process, will make a living from more sustainable livestock production systems. One tool that might provide real opportunities is precision livestock farming (PLF). In contrast to previous approaches, PLF systems aim to offer a real-time monitoring and management system that focuses on improving the life of the animals by warning when problems arise so that the farmer may take immediate action. Continuous, fully automatic monitoring and improvement of animal health and welfare, product yields and environmental impacts should become possible. This paper presents examples of systems that have already been developed in order to demonstrate the potential benefits of this technology.

For hatcheries, not only is it important to have a high level of hatchability, but the quality of the chicks provided also has to be good, because br