FAO Builds AI Tool to Identify Georgia's Native Cattle Breeds

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is building an artificial intelligence tool that identifies Georgia’s native cattle breeds from photographs, according to a report by Georgia Today. The project aims to close long-standing gaps in the country’s livestock records and support conservation of breeds found nowhere else in the world.

How the tool works

The planned mobile application will let field workers photograph an animal and receive an AI-generated suggestion of its breed — an image-recognition approach similar to tools already used to identify plants or wildlife. FAO is developing it with Georgia’s Scientific-Research Centre of Agriculture, part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture. To build the training data the system needs, FAO and Georgian researchers held a workshop on animal genetic resources, then traveled to the country’s mountainous regions to photograph indigenous herds and record reference data for each breed.

A data gap in a country with rich livestock diversity

Georgia has 48 cattle breeds registered in FAO’s Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS), a global database that tracks nearly 9,000 livestock breeds across 38 species. Of those, 40 are local breeds and eight are shared with neighboring countries. Population and conservation-status data are still missing for many of them, which makes it hard to know which breeds are actually at risk of dying out.

Tibor Szucs, an FAO livestock production specialist, said Georgia has “a rich livestock heritage and a strong foundation to build on,” and that stronger animal genetic resources data would support both national priorities and the broader effort to track livestock diversity worldwide.

Why it matters

Complete breed records feed into UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator 2.5.2, which measures the share of livestock breeds at risk of extinction. For a country with dozens of breeds scattered across remote, mountainous terrain, manual identification surveys are slow — an AI classifier could let field workers confirm a breed on the spot instead of waiting on lab analysis or expert review. Similar reasoning has pushed Georgia’s government toward other AI pilots, including a chatbot the national statistics office launched to help businesses navigate industry codes.

The breed-identification tool is still being trained on imagery collected during the field visits, and neither FAO nor Georgian officials have announced a date for a wider rollout.