# Can Livestock Farming Benefit from Industry 4.0 Technology? Evidence from Recent Study
## 2 Literature  
Basic constitutive elements of Industry 4.0 have been introduced before 2013, like the Internet of Things (IOT) [4], Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) [5], Digital Twins [6], Internet of Services (IoS) [7], Cloud Computing [8]. There is no commonly accepted explicit definition of Industry 4.0, but many experts have tried to give their own definition. [PERSON] et al. define Industry 4.0 as a \"collective term for technologies and concepts of value chain organization\", and they concretize their definition with a technical view: \"Within the modular structured Smart Factories of Industrie 4.0, CPS monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world, and make decentralized decisions. Over the IoT, CPS communicate and cooperate with each other and humans in real time. Via the IoS, both internal and cross-organizational services are offered and utilized by participants of the value chain\" [9]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] looked beyond the Industry 4.0 technologies and addressed eight areas of benefit of industry 4.0 which may be used in the definition of business model scenarios (Table 1) [3]. The Plattform's 2030 vision of Industry 4.0 focuses on autonomy (in the sense of sovereignty), interoperability, and sustainability [10; 11]. In view of this, Industry 4.0 might also be of some relevance for agricultural production. The transfer of Industry 4.0 technologies and concepts to agriculture has been discussed since about 2018. [PERSON] et al. postulated that methods of the Industry 4.0 portfolio appear suitable for agricultural supply chains. They showed that Industry 4.0 concepts affect all levels in the management hierarchy and offer new opportunities for collaboration and digital communication with all partners in the supply chain, including the consumer [12]. [PERSON] et al. focused on the virtualization of the agri-food supply chain and on the farm management system that has a virtual representation of the supply chain and interfaces to the real world [13]. [PERSON] et al. presented comprehensive scientific literature related to Industry 4.0 and agriculture up to 2020 [14]. They call the IoT in agriculture a \"space-air-ground-undersurface integrated network (SAGUIN)\", which extends the previously introduced term \"space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN)\" [15]. The Association of German Engineers (VDI) has presented a status report about the state of Industry 4.0 technologies in agriculture [16]. That status report illustrated the big difference between the preconditions of industrial and agricultural production. The status report concluded that many Industry 4.0 concepts may be applied or adapted to agriculture, but today, even digitized production processes in crop production and animal husbandry are hardly digitally interconnected. Therefore, even with the principal condition of Industry 4.0, digital interconnection is still widely missing in agriculture. [PERSON] et al. [17] investigated the state and potential of Industry 4.0 in agriculture by transferring the most important Industry 4.0 benefits to selected agricultural use cases. Their work contains only short, summarized statements for livestock farming. In the study presented here, this approach was further elaborated through an in-depth look into the three predominant livestock farming sectors of Europe and a more in-depth discussion of whether and how to transfer these benefits from industrial to livestock farming use cases. The motivation for this in-depth examination was more evidence and a better understanding of Industry 4.0 benefits in livestock farming. Care must be taken when it comes to the term **Agriculture 4.0**. The establishment of the term Industry 4.0 inspired the emergence of the term Agriculture 4.0 or Farming 4.0 [13; 14]. Manufacturers of farm equipment and software, service providers, and others started early to advertise their products with the term Agriculture 4.0 or Farming 4.0, meaning something like digitalization in agriculture and smart farming, without connecting to Industry 4.0 ideas [18].