Daily grazing time of free-ranging cattle as an indicator of available feed

Title
Daily grazing time of free-ranging cattle as an indicator of available feed
Publication Date
2015
Author(s)
Roberts, Julie R
Trotter, Mark
Schneider, Derek
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1897-4175
Email: dschnei5@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:dschnei5
Lamb, David
Hinch, Geoffrey
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4731-865X
Email: ghinch@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:ghinch
Dobos, Robin C
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9110-6729
Email: rdobos2@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:rdobos2
Editor
Editor(s): M Guarino and D Berckmans
Type of document
Conference Publication
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
European Conference on Precision Livestock Farming
Place of publication
Milan, Italy
UNE publication id
une:21758
Abstract
The hypothesis of this research was that livestock movement is related to feed availability and therefore spatial and temporal livestock information. Collected through autonomous position tracking devices, this may be used as an indicator of available feed. Two separate experiments were undertaken in which grazing cattle were tracked with store-on-board GPS. Additionally, pasture biomass was monitored with active optical sensing and manual cuts throughout the duration of the experiments. Cattle grazing behaviour was determined from the GPS data with speed-based behaviour models. The time cattle spent grazing per day altered with changing pasture biomass in both experiments. The daily time spent grazing was commonly found to initially be almost constant before following a quadratic trend, increasing before decreasing as available biomass declined. Development of behaviour models for autonomous livestock monitoring could assist producers with decisions related to rotation and feed management.
Link
Citation
Precision Livestock Farming '15: Papers presented at the 7th European Conference on Precision Livestock Farming, p. 491-500
ISBN
9788890975325
Start page
491
End page
500

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