The number of computer “packages” now being offered to farmers is growing rapidly and this paper does not present an exhaustive or critical account of these. Rather, it concentrates on packages offered by the feed trade to the intensive animal production sector of British agriculture. The paper will deal with the cattle, pig and poultry sectors, in that order, and then examine computer applications as they have developed, are now, and how they may become. Finally, the important criteria when considering the potential success of new computer packages will be described.

Though some may consider the cattle sector to be less progressive than the pig and poultry sectors, as far as the application of the computer is concerned, cattle led the way. The earliest application was in the late 50's and early 60's, when the feed trade abandoned hand formulation of cattle feeds and provided one of the first commercial applications of linear programming—least-cost feed formulation. Though in those days, diet specifications were heavily constrained by raw material limits (for example, 5% fixed linseed cake and 5% copra cake in a well known high performance dairy feed), the effects were to reduce formulation costs by about 5% (£1 per ton in those days!). Cattle feeds were soon universally computer formulated, closely followed by pig feeds. Broiler and turkey foods remained as fixed formulae for some time but, as nutritional knowledge increased, these too fell into line. Currently, only a few specialized diets, such as baby pig foods, remain as fixed formulae. The remaining products now have very few raw material constraints left but many are tightly constrained on amino acids, undegradable protein, fatty acid levels and rations, various descriptions of energy components, etc.