In 2067 dairy farms in developing countries will be modernized and automated systems will replace much of the manual labour on farms. Traditionally, livestock management decisions have been based on almost entirely on observations, judgement, and experience of the farmer. However, such manual systems are inherently subjective, labour intensive, time consuming, invasive and unreliable. Today technology-oriented approaches are widely in use in animal agriculture. New data obtained using fast, real time, and affordable objective measures are becoming more readily available to aid farm level monitoring, awareness, and decision making. Computer vision technology and image analysis, digital twins, artificial intelligence, sensors, big data, and machine learning are a game changer in the livestock industry. This review aims at highlighting the main areas where digital technologies for improved animal monitoring and welfare are most applicable in dairy animals. In particular, body condition scoring, lameness detection, mastitis diagnosis, oestrus detection and pregnancy diagnosis. The environmental sustainability of digital technologies is also discussed. The application of technology offers new possibilities to realize food safety and quality, efficient and sustainable animal farming, healthy animals, guaranteed wellbeing and acceptable environmental impact of livestock production.

An attempt was made to work out the factor shares and value shares of output in livestock sector over last 19 years and to examine in the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth of livestock production i.e. livestock production growth over and above the input growth in Tamil Nadu using secondary data for the period from 1999-2000 to 2017-18 from various reports on state-wise estimates of value of outputs from Central Statistics Office, Government of India and Department of Economics and Statistics, Government of Tamil Nadu. The share of milk to total value of output in Tamil Nadu decreased from 68 per cent to 27 per cent from the year 1999-2000 to 2017-18, whereas product shares of meat increased from 18.45 per cent to 64.77 per cent during the same period. During the same period, the factor shares of feed (47.65 per cent to 38.06 per cent) and dry fodder (36 per cent to 20 per cent) was decreased, in contrast to the share of green fodder (10 to 19 per cent). The value of TFP was found to be increasing gradually from the year 2000-01 to 2002-03 and drastically declined during the year 2003-04 (0.95), thereafter it increased gradually from the period 2003-04 to 2016-17, with drastic dip during 2011-12 and minor dip during 2007-08, 2013-14, 2015-16 and 2017-18. From the year 1999- 2000, the cumulative TFP index increased to 6.17 during 2004-05, 12.79 during 2010-11 and 20.38 during 2017-18 with increase of one unit per annum, which indicated good sign of livestock development in Tamil Nadu. It could be concluded that the technological interventions in livestock sector (output growth over and above the input growth) in Tamil Nadu shared about 72 per cent in the growth of livestock sector for the past 19 years.