Document type: article published in La Montagne
Author: AFP
Preview: AI can make a contribution towards animal welfare and the fight against climate change, in the view of Florence Gondret, a Research Director at the French Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), AFP tells us. The specialist in farm animal physiology will be giving a talk on AI at the International Livestock Show (the Space), to be held from September 16 to 19 in Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine).
Does AI encourage intensive farming?
It's true that we do not yet have enough distance to truly understand who will be able to take advantage of AI. But farmers have very often become digital farmers. Nowadays, 50% of dairy farmers in Western Brittany have their own milking robots and two-thirds of goat farmers use at least one networked tool. AI ultimately supports a farmer's own observations, extending what s/he can see for her/himself: it provides the capability for real-time monitoring over long periods, in situations where farmers cannot be watching their animals 24 hours a day. In today's agriculture, and in livestock farming in particular, we can find a number of examples that demonstrate how AI can enable farming to move forward, helping it to apply agroecological principles that enable it to reconnect with nature. In the field of health, it is possible to diagnose a respiratory infection or a threat to an animal's welfare at an earlier stage, before the veterinarian or the farmer has detected the first signs.
Will AI inevitably lead to greater automation?
No, AI will not replace the farmer; it is a support tool for some decisions, but it cannot replace the farmer's know-how. The idea is to relieve farmers from certain arduous tasks, to replace them where automation will be of benefit and where human decision-making is ultimately of little importance, thereby enabling them to have more quality time to spend with their animals.
Will the use of AI in livestock farming inevitably worsen global warming?
Agriculture is based on the living world, so we have to ask ourselves what we want to achieve through AI and what benefits we hope to derive from it. We are betting that AI will help us fight global heating more effectively, for example by reducing methane emissions from ruminant farming systems, reducing nitrogen pollution from pigs, improving animal welfare and detecting problems earlier, so we can respond without recourse to drugs.
