The development of the livestock sector in today’s extremely challenging military, political, and socio-economic conditions is impossible without the application of ‘breakthrough’ innovative solutions designed to create significant and sustainable competitive advantages.

At the same time, the importance of livestock farming will only grow due to objective structural shifts in the system of income generation for agricultural producers, as the conversion of the value of crop production—the backbone of the domestic agricultural sector—into products with more stable demand on the domestic market serves as a lever for stabilising and improving the financial and economic condition of agricultural businesses.

The main problems currently hindering livestock producers from improving the efficiency of their businesses are:

· increased running costs due to rising resource prices, which limits the scope for creating price advantages;

· instability in production outcomes due to seasonal factors and the variability in the characteristics of farm animals, particularly productivity and disease resistance, which complicates the stabilisation of financial and economic results;

· extremely high dependence on imports of foreign genetic materials, veterinary medicines, etc., which also significantly increases producers’ operating costs.

At the same time, the decline in household incomes acts as a constraint on the growth of the domestic market’s volume characteristics and as a challenge that prompts producers to create price-competitive advantages by reducing the cost of the combination of resources used and by adopting rational approaches to maintaining the stability of production and financial and economic results.

An appropriate response to such challenges and conditions is the search for innovative solutions designed to enhance the price competitiveness of products and ensure predictable and controllable outcomes of production activities.

In fact, the systematic application of such solutions by entities in the agricultural sector of the national economy was implemented in the crop production sector ten to fifteen years ago through the creation of a sufficiently robust system of planned production. Today’s challenges, however, require similar shifts in the livestock sector.

The complexity of these problems requires a systematic approach to their resolution. The Institute of Animal Husbandry of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences has developed a series of programmes to support innovative development, which allow for the application of both incremental (traditional) innovative solutions and breakthrough (non-standard) innovations, the implementation of which will significantly reduce unit production costs. They will enable steadily increasing and controllable results from production activities, leading to improved economic efficiency of core operations, stabilisation of the financial and economic situation and incomes of commodity producers, as well as the creation of sustainable competitive advantages.

In this context, incremental solutions involve transformations in feeding, selection and genetics, reproduction, and livestock husbandry technologies, whilst breakthrough innovations enable the reduction of variation in the production traits of productive animals, the creation of herds standardised by genetic and production parameters, and the enhancement of the organisational and technological stability of production systems.

A key solution among the innovations in the second category is the creation of genetic copies of the most productive animals by reconstructing their embryos from somatic cells, which will enable the production of productive animals with the same characteristics as the donor animals.

The systematic application of these innovative solutions forms the basis for building programmable livestock farming systems, increasing efficiency and stabilising the income of production enterprises and their associations.

The topic of increasing the income of livestock farms will be discussed at the Ukrainian Livestock Summit 2023 on 13 October at the Kyiv Golf Centre. Tickets are available on the website: https://livestock-summit.com.ua/