# Can Livestock Farming Benefit from Industry 4.0 Technology? Evidence from Recent Study
## 4 Results
### Dairy Farming
#### 4.4.2 State and Potential of Industry 4.0 Benefits  
**Digital individualization:** Other than in broiler and pig fattening, cows have always been addressed and documented as individuals. More than that, in dairy production, a quarter of the udder is also a typical entity. The advantages of quarter-individual milking are described in the literature [93; 94; 95; 96; 97]. This type of milking is available in AMSs as well as in conventional milking parlors [98]. There are both animal-related (cow, udder quarters) and product-related (milk) approaches to individualization. A system that has been in use for a long time is the individual administration of concentrated feed via a station with the identification of the animal via a transponder. In modern software for herd management, each cow has their own data set, including all available data of the single cows. Automatic process control like in the AMS requires many more data. The guidance of the robot arm is based on the stored data of body measurements combined with online sensors finding the teats. When milking, there are also approaches to separate the milk individually for each animal and its ingredients, in order to enable individual marketing. Decision support is currently the most intensively investigated field in the area of individual dairy health management. To identify an abnormal behavior of a single cow and combine that digital 'information' with a probably ongoing health disorder is the aim of many research activities [99]. For prognosis health events, it is well known that it leads to more sensitivity to compare the current value with the moving average of the same animal (for example, of the last 5 days) and not with the current mean of the total herd [100; 101]. **Flexibilization:** Dairy production is a process, strongly dependent on a number of time-consuming, biological rhythms, such as growing, puberty, pregnancy, lactation, milk synthesis, or milk ejection. Consequently, flexibility from the point of process control can be organized only within these limits. Flexibility is difficult to implement with AMSs and other automated systems due to their workload and continuous use over the day and year. If the farmer is taken into account in the system, there is a high degree of flexibility. The farmer is relieved of site- and animal-related monotonous work and can devote himself to monitoring the process and animals. The container AMS, which accompanies the cows to the pasture when they are kept on the pasture and come back to the barn in the autumn, could be seen as an approach to make grazing husbandry more flexible. At present, flexibility cannot yet be recognized as a direction of development. The focus is currently more on adaptation through individualization in individual companies. **Demand Orientation (\"X-as-a-Service\"):** The idea of providing technology based on need is not widespread in the dairy cattle sector. The individual systems are permanently assigned to the building, and the animal stock is adapted to the technology rather than vice versa. Only in the case of mobile feeding systems, there sometimes exists the approach that they are used and billed by several companies as required. **Sustainability:** Worldwide dairy farmers are engaged to make their production systems more sustainable [89; 90; 91]. There is a copious amount of literature to improve the three pillars of sustainability. Especially in relation to the experiences with Industry 4.0 processes, dairy farming has many options for improving sustainability by adopting these. The product service system [102], as a tool for improving resource efficiency, may be one direction [103], and the integration of circularity by the design [104] of future dairy farming technologies is a further option. Dairy farming shows that automation makes it possible to decouple the processes from the human workforce and may increase human wellbeing. This means that even small units can operate sustainably.