On August 16th, at the opening ceremony of the "2025 Symposium on Intelligent Livestock Equipment and Smart Farming", the national smart animal husbandry data sharing service HERD platform (Holistic Explainable Referential Datahub) was officially released, which was developed by the team led by the principal scientist Tang Xiangfang, Deputy Director of the Institute of Animal Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. This platform is the first national-level data platform in our country that oriented towards smart animal husbandry and provides high-quality, fully public data management and sharing services, marking that our country's animal husbandry industry has taken an important step of open sharing on the road of digital and intelligent development.
Dr. Li Jinxiang, former National Chief Veterinary Officer of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs; Dr. Qin Yuchang, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine; Dr. Peter Groot Koerkamp, professor from Wageningen University, Netherlands; Dr. Liu Jifang, Party Secretary of the Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; Dr. Zhang Mingfu, Party Secretary of the Institute of Animal Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; Dr. Li Baoming, President of the Animal Husbandry Engineering Branch of the China Animal Agriculture Association; and Dr. Xiong Benhai, Honorary Chairman of the Information Technology Branch of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, and others, jointly launched the platform. Dr. Tang Xiangfang gave a special report titled "HERD: A New Paradigm for Solving the Hidden Dangers of 'Data Debt' in Smart Animal Husbandry", deeply elaborating on the platform's construction background, technical architecture, functional layout, and its application prospects in smart animal husbandry, and received high praise from the attending experts.
It is reported that the HERD platform was led by the Institute of Animal Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and jointly completed by multiple scientific research institutes and leading industry enterprises. The platform integrates multi-dimensional data covering the farming environment, animal individual information, production performance, health indicators, behavior monitoring, etc., supports multi-species and multi-scenario access, has realized a high-quality data governance project starting from data annotation, and has established a unified data standard and metadata management system, as well as a strict data review and sharing mechanism. Currently, the HERD platform has included a large number of high-quality datasets, covering multiple major livestock and poultry species and typical farming scenarios. HERD platform supports functions such as online data query, visual display, data sharing and collection, which will provide all-round data support for scientific and technological innovation, farming management, policy formulation and supervision, equipment and product research and development, etc.
In the next step, the Institute of Animal Science of CAAS will unite with relevant units to continuously optimize the HERD platform's functions, expand data sources, improve data processing tools, deepen cooperation with domestic and foreign scientific research institutions and enterprises, and build the platform into an important data infrastructure that leads the global development of smart animal husbandry.
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