18 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN February 2026 THE OTHER AI Artificial Intelligence and What It Means for the Beef Industry Part 2 Last month, we provided a broad overview of what artificial intelligence (AI) is. To recap, in case you missed it, AI is a form of machine learning that creates systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. This can include learning from data, reasoning, solving problems, understanding language and recognizing patterns. In other words, AI is about building machines that can think or act intelligently. AI is trained through data collection and can be trained to draw inferences about complex relationships that may be difficult to detect. This enables it to make sense of data that can be very complicated in an efficient way. AI is quickly integrating into many aspects of daily life across the country, but many cattle producers have yet to start utilizing it in their day-to-day operations on the ranch. PROGRAMS YOU MIGHT CONSIDER “Artificial intelligence has the potential to become the tool that helps us see things we couldn’t see before, and also do things that used to be super repetitive and laborious,” says Yijie Xiong, Ph.D., assistant professor and precision livestock management Extension specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Operations that include farming may have seen AI integrate into their daily lives with self-steering tractors. It is through AI and the algorithms developed that the tractors have superior accuracy when steering themselves. There is even technology that will take aerial imagery of your field and, through AI, generate a detailed map of where all of the rocks are, allowing you to pick rocks in a fraction of the time and start planting. “One good example is the row cropping systems,” Xiong explains. “Computers or machine learning cameras can identify moldy points before human eyes can notice them.” Another simple yet powerful example comes in the form of irrigation monitoring. “So many growers now use AI tools that enable irrigation scheduling tools, which can combine satellite imagery with data collected from soil-moisture sensors and water-forecast information,” Xiong says. “Think about how complicated that is, but AI has that ability to combine all of that information and predict when a field will actually need irrigation and how much it will need.” Xiong, along with some of her colleagues at UNL, has been working on an AI application to estimate forage availability. The program, Snap2Graze, uses a photo of a pasture and the AI algorithm that they have developed to predict the amount of canopy cover that the photo is showing. “We take a picture of the forage, and then the AI alogrithm that we developed can take that picture and tell us that in this picture, we have about 50 percent of cereal rye cover in relation to the soil,” Xiong explains. “From this percentage, we can predict how much forage mass the area has. This is important because it gives producers the ability to simply take representative photos via smarphones and the tool provides the best estimate of how much biomass they have available. That allows producers to figure out how many cows they can stock on that pasture based on the pounds per acre of available forage mass that the program detected.” The feedlot and seedstock sectors are seeing an increase in the amount of information that can be collected through electronic identification (EID) tags. Data is collected by sensors, EID tags and cameras. Once the algorithm is “trained” satisfactorily, more data is continuously collected (i.e., how often cattle go to water or to feed). AI can even use those photos to recognize different cows’ faces, muzzle prints or body features. It can even predict the animals’ body condition score. With the integration of cameras, algorithms can now detect abnormal behavior in near real time. If the algorithm detects a change in behavior, such as a cow not coming to feed or not leaving water for an extended period, then it flags this as a potential problem and notifies management. Programs such as Performance Beef from Performance Livestock Analytics or Cattler, have been developed to streamline the process of feeding cattle – from developing rations TRESSA LAWRENCE | CONTRIBUTING WRITER PRODUCTION
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