YIELD monitors on headers have given croppers valuable information on the variation within their paddocks but Keilira farmer Jack England, South Australia, is convinced livestock can do the same job.
The 2016 Nuffield scholar sees huge potential for GPS collars, attached to cattle or sheep to track their time spent grazing, walking and ruminating.
This information could be combined with infrared reflectance, such as satellite pasture growth rates through Pastures from Space, to produce paddock yield maps and growth responses to varying treatments.
Last year in northern Israel he saw Moonitor collars, which have been used and refined for the past decade.
At $400 a collar, plus $10 a month for satellite access, he says they are feasible for his herd of 400 cows and 8500 Merino ewes, given they only need to be attached to five per cent of the herd or flock.
“Based on an animal’s movement, frequency and duration of grazing we can calculate with a high degree of accuracy not only the dry matter they remove from specific areas, but calculate the metabolisable energy and digestibility of the pasture intake and expected animal performance,” Mr England said.
He said mature stock only absorbed a small amount of phosphorus, so knowing where they deposited their manure could enable less fertiliser to be applied to these zones and more applied to areas of higher pasture growth and removal.
Additional phosphorus could then be applied in paddocks used for lambing and weaning, which remove the lion’s share of phosphorus for bone and tissue development.
The information from the collars can also provide early warning signs on spontaneous abortions or joining issues and can alert owners to stock theft.
Mr England found there was an abundance of precision agriculture technology available to livestock producers but reiterated the need to look at the cost-benefit ratio.
“Don’t be dismissive of new technology or techniques,” he said.
“If you don’t know how to do something maybe talk to someone or employ someone who does – or you will be left behind.”
Critical to the success will be good farm software packages that are intuitive, such as AgriWebb, which he can use to automatically calculate the total kilograms of pasture removed in each paddock and replace nutrients accordingly.
“Livestock precision agriculture is just getting started,” Mr England said.
“We need to focus on maximising income per hectare rather than just focusing on lowest cost of production.”
Trace element supplements for livestock also rarely pay, according to Mr England’s research, but more needs to be done to assess potential pasture utilisation gains.
He urged producers looking at using supplements in a chelated or mineral form to do a trial where some animals were left untreated rather than accepting animal health companies’ claims.
Mr England found just a few properties in his travels which had undertaken rigorous soil, pasture and liver biopsies combined with animal performance measures to test their viability.
Feedback from the University of SRUC in Scotland found many product reviewing companies were only reporting seven out of 10 sample results at most.
“Utilising pasture in the most cost-effective manner is key,” he said.
“If farmers’ trials show economic benefit, foliar applications onto pastures to address known livestock mineral deficiencies which the stock can consume in a protein form can be effective.”
“A lot of people are injecting or pouring thousands of dollars down animal throats for potentially no apparent benefit.”
Mr England said his Nuffield study in the UK, Israel, New Zealand, Canada and Australia was incredible.
“It highlights that farmers make mistakes that we don’t need to make but there are people doing incredible stuff that we want to learn a lot more from,” he said.
“The Nuffield network gives you access to positive farmers always searching for a competitive edge and it gives you the confidence to have a go yourself.”
