Abstract:Ruminant livestock such as cattle and sheep can provide high-quality beef, mutton and milk, which are high-quality protein sources meeting the increasingly diverse food consumption needs for human being. Developing high-quality herbivorous animal husbandry is a concrete practice of practicing the “Greater Food” approach. The precise supply of forages and concentrates meeting the requirements of all nutrients in the whole life cycle is vital for cost saving and efficiency increasing of ruminant livestock industry, which is an important way to high-quality development. The whole life cycle nutrition is developed on the basis of traditional ruminant nutrition and new technologies made breakthroughs in understanding life and health. Its essence lies in optimizing the ration formulation based on the theory of systematic nutrition regulation and the theory of short-term and long-term effects of early life nutrition, with a final goal to establish precision nutrition system in combination with technologies in big data and artificial intelligence. Compared with the traditional technology in ration formulation, it is obviously scientific, systematic, and progressive. In this study, the concept, significance, and goals of whole life cycle nutrition in ruminants are briefly introduced. This paper elaborates the key scientific issues and technological problems in the development of whole life cycle nutrition system of ruminant livestock in China, and summarizes the research progress on nutrition regulation, diet formulation, and fundamental research on the long-term impact of early life nutrition in ruminants. Finally, taking the development of modern grassland sheep industry in Hulun Buir State Farm Conglomerate as an example, the concept of building whole life cycle nutrition and promoting high-quality development of ruminant livestock industry is discussed from the aspects of whole life cycle division, whole diet formula, and whole industry chain.