On property benefits of precision livestock management technologies

Abstract

Precision Livestock Management (PLM) has been identified as an imperative investment area in the northern Beef RD&E Strategy. Precision Livestock Management refers to a range of new technologies and applications with the potential to improve environmental sustainability, productivity, price received, labour and cost efficiency through enhanced measurement, monitoring or management. However, it is still unclear exactly what benefits incorporating these technologies into northern Australian beef enterprises would deliver. Difficulties in defining how emerging technologies could be applied and the lack of quantitative property level data on which to base assumptions about technology costs and benefits contribute to this uncertainty. The project team have been working with five commercial beef producers across northern Australia to identify how six PLM technologies can be applied at the enterprise level. The six technologies considered were: 1) walk over weighing (WOW), 2) auto-drafting, 3) the ePreg system, 4) low resolution spatial animal information, 5) high resolution spatial animal information and 6) remote vegetation sensing. The objectives of the project is to ranked the economic benefits and feasibility of promising PLM technology applications for five northern beef case-study properties and investigate how these might be implemented to measure their impact on the enterprise. The five case study properties will be located in Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. PLM technologies will be evaluated in relation to the enterprise-operating environment and their potential to increase enterprise operating margin. A complete model of farm production costs and benefits was implemented to evaluate the potential economic impact from PLM technologies. In-depth interviews with case-study property managers were conducted to obtain economic and production data about the current enterprise and provide insights into the expected benefits of selected PLMs. The approach used allows property and regional level differences in potential net benefits of the PLM technologies to be captured. The economic analysis will focus on property-level potential net benefits of the selected PLM technologies using the case studies to inform a farm-business model incorporating risk and uncertainty. The method proposed represents a generalisation of traditional Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) allowing examination of traditional BCA metrics such as the Internal Rate of Return (IRR), discounted cash flows and the Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) cash flows, benefit cost analysis, net present value and internal rate of return.