Building the Evidence Base for AI-Enabled Livestock Advisory Services

This proposal comprises two interconnected workstreams forming SRUC’s contribution to a broader programme of precision livestock technology and AI-enabled advisory services across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The first workstream advances the Kapiti Farm Digital Twin; a working system developed in Phase I that integrates collar sensor data, GPS tracking, weather data and heat stress phenotyping for cattle at ILRI’s Kapiti Research Station, Kenya. Phase II extends this with live data architecture, remote sensing integration, a next-generation low-cost sensor, and AI agent monitoring.

The second workstream supports partners in designing and building the investment case for an AI-enabled livestock advisory platform by means of an agentic framework that routes farmer queries to the right tool at the right level of complexity, delivers hyper-local responses, and aggregates interactions into population-level signals including early disease outbreak detection.

The two workstreams are complementary: the digital twin provides field-validated phenotyping and sensor infrastructure that informs the broader advisory platform; the advisory platform provides the agentic architecture into which digital twin outputs will ultimately be integrated.