The Quest for Darkness in Chile’s Atacama Desert
T oday’s factory farms are monuments to humanity’s unprecedented technological sophistication and our seemingly limitless capacity for cruelty.
Over the past half century, industrial farms have selectively bred animals to grow much faster and larger than their natural patterns, leading to health issues such as chronic pain. Meanwhile, these creatures are kept in harsh, crowded conditions and slaughtered inhumanely. The close confinement and unsanitary conditions on factory farms can breed zoonotic diseases and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
What’s more, scientists tell us that eliminating animal products from our plates is one of the best things we can do as individuals to mitigate climate change and other environmental threats.
Amid this moral, environmental, and public health catastrophe, meat industry technologists are proposing precision livestock farming, or PLF, as a solution. PLF is the use of digital tools to continuously monitor livestock parameters, offering precise information about farmed animals in real-time.
PLF is a small but rapidly growing field. Although these tools have been around since the early 2000s, 65 percent of all literature on the matter was published in the past five years alone. Improvements in sensor technology and the computing power to interpret the sensors’ output are responsible for this. Artificial intelligence, or AI, in particular has given rise to many new PLF applications. Still, the reality of AI on farms, for now at least, is more mundane than what some may imagine: fewer robots, more surveillance cameras and buzzing sensors.
