The livestock sector must urgently improve sustainability by enhancing environmental performance, animal health and welfare, food security, and fair economic returns, while reducing nutrient losses and antimicrobial use by 2030. Digital technologies can support this transition, but progress is limited by high costs, poor standardisation, fragmented data, restrictive sharing rules, and privacy concerns. Currently, data is fragmented across farmers, authorities, and other actors, often requiring repeated manual input into multiple systems.
New EU policies, such as the Data Act, are changing this landscape by enabling better reuse of data and encouraging data sharing services and voluntary data altruism. This creates new opportunities to use digital tools, tracking, and tracing technologies to advance research, governance, and innovation in livestock systems.
Digi4Live builds on this momentum. Digi4Live is a 4.5 years Horizon Europe coordination and support action. By using a strong multi-actor and co-creation approach that brings together livestock sector actors from science to industries and competent authorities, and engages them in the co-creation of digital and data concepts, Digi4Live enables greater use of current and new data and digital technologies in livestock tracking. Six case studies contribute to shaping Digi4Live’s Key Exploitable Results by focusing on:
A) the generation of datasets in animal health and welfare,
B) enhancing value chain resilience and transparency,
C) developing robust artificial intelligence methods for sensor-based animal tracking,
D) integrating different technologies and data, including animal breeding,
E) making use of data digitalization for environmental impact assessment, and
F) investigating digital solutions in policy, impact monitoring and public administration across the EU member states.
