Data Driven Smart Livestock Farming in Australia From Design to Implementation

With the Australian red-meat industry on the brink of a digital revolution, this book offers a clear and practical roadmap to overcome long-standing challenges like disconnected systems and incompatible software. At its core is the Livestock Event Information (LEI) schema, a standardised way to record key livestock events—such as weights, breedings, and vaccinations—using a common language that everyone in the supply chain can understand. Building on this foundation, the book introduces the Livestock Event Information Sharing Architecture (LEISA), a flexible system that connects farmers, processors, regulators, and service providers without relying on a centralised database. Instead of promoting a one-size-fits-all platform, LEISA focuses on flexibility and independence, allowing farmers to keep control of their data while enabling better collaboration, traceability, and insights across the industry. Through real-world examples, the book shows how this approach works in practice, from setting up systems and validating data to creating dashboards that help with biosecurity, compliance, and performance tracking. It demonstrates how smarter, connected systems can turn livestock data into valuable insights that benefit everyone in the supply chain. Designed to be adaptable to other agricultural sectors and not tied to any specific cloud platform, this book provides a practical guide to building a more connected and sustainable livestock industry. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of agricultural informatics and technology, smart farming, software engineering and data management in livestock production.