Potential for Remote Monitoring of Cattle Movement to Indicate Available Biomass

Abstract

There is a call for sustainable intensification of agricultural industries to cope with impending challenges to future food demand and production. Beef and sheep meat production in Australia is dominated by grazing production systems, and equates to the largest land use of the country. Pasture utilisation by livestock can be a major limiting factor in grazing production systems, through under- or over-grazing. This thesis aims to identify if spatio-temporal information from livestock tracking devices can be used to understand livestock-biomass interactions in a rotational grazing system. The specific goal was to determine if this spatio-temporal data might be related to pasture characteristics (particularly biomass quantity) and potentially used as an indicator of the state of the pastures being grazed. Cattle were tracked with GPS for detection and monitoring of specific behaviours including, distance moved, time spent grazing, stationary or travelling, spatial dispersion and social dispersion. Behaviours were compared with declining pasture availability, monitored with an active optical sensor. This thesis explores the behaviour of cattle in three grazing situations.