# Can Livestock Farming Benefit from Industry 4.0 Technology? Evidence from Recent Study
## 6 Conclusions  
Livestock farming differs from industrial production: livestock production must cope with the market demand, but it must also cope with the needs of living animals. The animals on the farm are not \"material\", but they have their own ethical identity as living vertebrates and biological beings.  
When discussing the potential benefits of Industry 4.0 in livestock farming, animal identity and welfare must be taken into account as part of the business use case. This directly affects the benefits of individualization and demand orientation. While in the industrial sector, these benefits mainly relate to customer demand, in livestock farming, individualization and demand orientation are also related to the needs, health, and welfare of the individual animal. Sustainability has very high relevance in livestock farming, first, due to the high importance of animal health and welfare, and second, due to the strong interrelation with the environment, primarily by greenhouse gas emissions and organic residues.  
Many Industry 4.0 benefits are applicable and beneficial to livestock farming in a comparable manner as in industrial production: process orientation, automated learning, collaboration competence, and productivity optimization. Flexibility, however, has very little importance in livestock farming, since the high throughput production is very constant with very little requirement for flexibility.  
Industry 4.0 technologies and concepts are applicable to livestock farming and can promote Industry 4.0 benefits as described in this article. Major challenges are (a) technical standards for interoperability between technology from different manufacturers, (b) meaningful sensors at affordable prices for animal behavior and for other parameters, (c) intelligent, integrated, and comprehensive FMISs that give the farmer valuable insight and decision support, and (d) farmers' knowledge and competence about Industry 4.0 benefits. The recent development of FMISs and data platforms already point towards Industry 4.0, but the other challenges still require huge effort and attention.  
This study was worked out by a transdisciplinary team of experts in Industry 4.0 and experts in livestock farming. It should be noted that the study design did not strictly follow an acknowledged research method but was adapted to the procedure chosen to find the results. The procedure consisted of both unsystematic literature research and targeted discussion rounds to make use of expert knowledge in a structured manner.  
Conceptualization and methodology, M.K., H.B., R.B., E.C., J.M., H.T., K.T. and C.W.; investigation, M.K., H.B., R.B., W.B., K.T. and M.Z.; visualization, M.K.; writing--original draft preparation, M.K., with contribution of H.B., R.B., W.B., E.C., H.G., H.T., K.T. and M.Z.; writing--review and editing, all authors. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research received no external funding.  
Not applicable.  
The authors want to express their thanks to the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e.V. (VDI), Dusseldorf, Germany, with [PERSON] and [PERSON] for the organizational background for writing the VDI status report Industrie-4.0-Technologien in der Landwirtschaft [16]. We further want to thank all co-authors of that report for the many fruitful discussions of topics presented in this article. We want to express our thanks to the reviewers. Their comments helped us a lot to improve the paper.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.