Major Genes Livestock

This book presents a concept for implementing a mass balance approach toward developing an effective eco-friendly, livestock farming system independent of external energy input. In this context it describes a modern, integrated farming system, and includes comprehensive technical information explaining the design and evaluation of manure management systems, and modeling and operational tools.

This volume provides a detailed description of key aspects of livestock health issues and farming practices.

Chapters cover such topics as antimicrobial resistance in livestock, nutrition and its role in animal health and farming, nutrition and health management in dairy animals, and livestock feeding in semi-arid regions.

The delivery of genome sequences for most livestock species over the past 10-15 years has generated the potential to revolutionise livestock production globally, by providing farmers with the ability to match individual animals to rapidly changing climates, production systems and markets. Initially, technologies such as marker-assisted selection, functional genomics, gene expression, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics were hailed as technologies with the greatest promise of delivering on that potential. To date, however, their potential for the delivery of practical solutions for livestock farmers is still to be realised, though they do provide supportive evidence of value to other approaches. Gene editing using tools such as CRISPR-Cas9 also show strong promise, but face regulatory hurdles before practical applications can be delivered for use by farmers.

This book provides applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in environmental monitoring, with an emphasis on livestock disease detection and agricultural management in Africa to aid farmers. This proposed system entails current and innovative monitoring technologies intended to improve agricultural conditions in Africa, with a focus on Botswana, and addresses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a set of remote monitoring protocols using WSNs to improve and ensure proper environmental maintenance.