Technology and AI: The new ‘chef’ producing a precise nutrient bite for livestock

Animal nutrition is entering a different era. Advances in genetics, enzymes, amino acid balancing, mineral programs, and feed processing technologies have transformed performance across poultry, swine, dairy, and beef systems. Today, the challenge is no longer simply what goes into the feed, but understanding how nutrients behave once they enter the animal.

Across livestock systems, heat stress, disease pressure and antibiotic reduction, volatile ingredient costs, reproductive efficiency, labour shortages, and sustainability expectations are forcing producers to operate with greater precision. The result is a growing shift toward precision nutrition: delivering the right nutrients, in the right form, at the right moment, to the right animal.

Technology is becoming the ‘chef’ behind that process, combining feed science, sensors, automation, artificial intelligence, and real-time biology into more connected nutritional systems.

AI: Reshaping feed formulation

For decades, feed formulation depended heavily on ingredient databases, nutritional models, and the practical experience of nutritionists. Those systems transformed livestock production, but they also simplified biology into static assumptions and average responses.

Artificial intelligence and big data are beginning to push nutrition beyond that model. Modern livestock systems now generate enormous volumes of information: feed composition, feed intake, growth performance, milk components, egg quality, carcass traits, environmental conditions, microbiome shifts, health events, and reproductive outcomes. AI systems are increasingly being used to identify nutritional interactions that are difficult to fully understand through traditional formulation approaches alone.

The implications are already becoming visible across species. In dairy production, nutritional strategies are becoming more connected to metabolic health, fertility, milk components, rumen activity, and transition cow performance. In poultry systems, biological monitoring and AI-supported analytics are becoming more integrated into production management, welfare oversight, and microbiome management. In swine production, AI and connected technologies are being positioned around feed efficiency, health management, labour optimisation, and continuous monitoring.

Future formulation systems may become more dynamic, continuously adapting nutritional strategies according to changing biological and environmental conditions inside the barn.

Sensors are making nutrition measurable in real time

The livestock industry is entering a period where nutrition can increasingly be measured continuously rather than periodically.

Sensors are already transforming how producers monitor animal performance. Milk analysis systems can now track components and quality in real time, while feeding sensors are beginning to measure what animals are actually consuming rather than what was formulated on paper. Environmental sensors continuously monitor temperature, humidity, ventilation, ammonia, and stress exposure. Computer vision systems are also being used to monitor feeding behaviour, weight gain, welfare, mobility, and disease risk.

In dairy systems, rumen boluses, robotic milking systems, and real-time milk analysis technologies are connecting nutrition with biological responses inside the cow. Today millions of cows are milked robotically, most notably in the Netherlands, several million cows in the US wear smart tags and the use of AI informed smart boluses (eg. Smaxtec) has exploded to measure core temperature and rumen digestion in real time.

Similar trends are emerging across poultry and swine production, where biological monitoring and environmental sensing are becoming more integrated into production management. For example, Xsights sensors in pigs detect changes in behaviour, temperature, and disease, but also track the use of medications. Verax from DSM uses AI with blood metabolites and the microbiome to predict nutrient imbalances and the early onset of disease.

This creates the possibility of feeding programs becoming adaptive rather than static. Feeding strategies could respond to stress events, microbiome changes, reproductive stages, disease pressure, and environmental conditions in near real time.

The ‘perfect nutrient bite’ may ultimately depend on predictive analytics, biological monitoring, environmental sensing, and intelligent nutritional systems working together continuously.

Feeding is becoming individualised

One of the biggest long-term shifts may be the movement toward individualised nutrition.

Historically, livestock nutrition has largely been designed around group averages. But animals inside the same barn often differ biologically in health status, productivity, stress response, feed intake, and nutrient requirements.

Robotics and precision feeding technologies are beginning to make more individualised feeding strategies possible.

The clearest examples are already emerging in dairy systems, where automated milking and feeding systems can adjust diets according to milk production, reproductive stage, body condition, and health indicators. Similar approaches are beginning to emerge in sow systems, where precision feeding technologies are improving feed allocation and nutritional control according to reproductive stage and body condition.

This shift may fundamentally change how nutrition is managed. Instead of formulating diets only around herd or flock averages, future systems may increasingly tailor nutrition at the individual animal level.

Microencapsulation is supporting precision delivery

As feeding systems become more precise, the importance of nutrient stability and targeted delivery also increases.

Microencapsulation technologies are being used to protect vitamins, amino acids, essential oils, organic acids, enzymes, and trace minerals from degradation during feed manufacturing and digestion. Research in pigs demonstrated that lipid matrix microencapsulation supported targeted intestinal delivery of thymol, with more than 41% reaching the mid-jejunum. Similar work in poultry systems evaluating lipid matrix microencapsulated trace minerals reported improvements in egg production and feed conversion compared with conventional mineral premixes.

Encapsulated nutrients designed to bypass rumen degradation are also moving from niche applications toward mainstream nutritional tools in ruminant systems.

A wide range of companies are now investing heavily in protected nutrients, microbiome management, precision delivery systems, and gut health technologies, including Kemin, Adisseo, Balchem, Alltech, Novus, and Jefo. Jefo’s Matrix Technology is seen by researchers as the next generation of lipid-based microencapsulation platforms, flexible enough to improve ingredient stability, controlled release, feed mill consistency, and with biological efficiency across livestock and aquaculture systems. Whether Jefo’s technology or others, the industry is shifting from simply adding nutrients towards controlling how nutrients are delivered, absorbed, and utilised inside dynamic biological systems in all species. Indeed, losses from ingredient interactions in the premix, in feed production, or the impact of the microflora on nutrient degradation are not insignificant and may represent an area for animal feed manufacturers to focus on as margins tighten and geopolitical forces complicate risk management of ingredients such as vitamins. Perhaps we should consider not precision nutrition but precision intestinal delivery as the key to performance and profitability.

The livestock industry has spent decades optimising feed formulations through linear programming and simple feed formulation, but with the real time information that digitisation affords. The next frontier coordinates nutrition more precisely across biology, automation, sensors, and intelligent decision-making systems. Precision nutrition will be less about individual ingredients and more about how entire biological systems are managed in real time.