Digital Technologies and Automation in Livestock Production Systems: a Digital Footprint from Multisource Data

In the last years, dairy production is changing fast towards smart livestock systems, driven by the rapid pace of technological advancements as Internet of Things, big data, machine learning, augmented reality and robotics. These technologies are pushing widespread collection, implementation, transmission and use of digitized information in livestock farms. Currently, this an uncontrolled process that poses questions on sustainability of the virtual environment where such processes take place. The aim of the present paper is to introduce a preliminary digitization footprint approach, which parameterizes the amount of digital information so as to quantify these data in terms of volumes invested for data storage, processing or transfer.