Individual animal management using eID to make productivity gains

By BCG Staff and Contributors
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2017 Report

Take home messages

  • Sheep production and profitability can be improved through individual animal management (IAM).
  • Only measure things you will use to select animals from or make management decisions, and integrate data collection with the animal management calendar to ensure it is time efficient.
  • Investing in eID technology doesn’t need to be expensive.

Introduction of eID to Victoria

To provide swift and accurate traceability to limit the impact of a disease outbreak or food safety related emergency, electronic identification (eID) of sheep and goats was mandated in Victoria in 2017. The transition program began with all lambs and kids born in Victoria after 1 January 2017 now tagged with eID before they leave their property of birth. Each animal will be tracked through their lifetime to saleyards, abattoirs and knackeries via the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) database. By 2022 all sheep and goats across Victoria, including adult animals and animals that have entered from interstate, must be tagged.

Historically, Australian sheep selection was on mob-based visual appraisal, with little knowledge of the objective, economically based data behind that animal. eID gives you the ability to track individual animals, and link their performance to that of the generations before and after. But for this data to have value it must be used to help inform management decisions that will improve production efficiencies and generate more profit – otherwise it is a time and money wasting exercise.

How can eID be useful?

Across a flock there is considerable variation in the traits that affect production. Some will be poor doers, most will be average, and the remaining animals will be a cut above the rest (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Example of the distribution of animal performance within a flock for a given trait(s).
Figure 1. Example of the distribution of animal performance within a flock for a given trait(s).

With traditional mob-based data collection and management, most of this variation usually stays within the flock. But by using eID and understanding the range in variation (rather than focusing on averages) you can apply selection pressure towards the more superior animals and make better informed management decisions.

eID tags can be accurately read by handheld or panel readers in a fraction of a second. These tools coupled with scales, auto-drafts and computer software now means that production data can be quickly recorded and used to manage animals. This saves time and labour, and avoids mistakes reading the tag number.

Individual animal management (IAM) aims to maximise production and returns on those better performing animals, while identifying the poorer performing animals or ‘passengers’ in the mob who can be managed differently or culled to minimise costs.

What can be measured?

With an eID system, you can record anything that can be measured objectively or rated subjectively.

Consider these four key points when deciding what to record for your sheep enterprise:
1. Only record data that will add value (or save costs) to the enterprise
2. There is no point in collecting data unless you use it!
3. Always keep data collection tasks as simple as possible
4. The more data you collect, the more time it takes and harder it is to manage.

IAM can be used the following ways to select stock for improved current and future production (adapted from Agriculture Victoria website):

Flock stocktake
  • Know exactly how many sheep are on your property right now
  • Which animals have received a treatment within the last month?
  • What sheep were sold in the last six months?
Wool flock (Figure 2)
  • Reduce fibre diameter and manage coefficient of variation (CV)
  • Increase fleece weight
  • Record pregnancy status and use to manage production and feed allocation
  • Ram selection and allocation to specific groups of ewes.
Figure 2. Example of fleece data collected for a commercial merino flock.
Figure 2. Example of fleece data collected for a commercial merino flock.
Meat flock (Figure 3)
  • Tracking specific bloodlines
  • Ram selection and allocation to specific groups of ewes
  • Record pregnancy status and use to manage production and feed allocation
  • Match ewe to her lambs using Pedigree MatchMaker, and use to calculate kilograms of lamb weaned per ewe. Soon Bluetooth® sensor technology will be another method available.
  • Use weight records and individual growth rates to assist in meeting market specifications. Reduce the number of sheep falling outside the specs.
  • Using carcass feedback to inform genetic and management decisions though Livestock Data Link (LDL).
Figure 3. Example of kilograms of lamb weaned per ewe with a commercial ewe flock.
Figure 3. Example of kilograms of lamb weaned per ewe with a commercial ewe flock.
Optimising meat and wool
  • Measure variation in growth rates
  • Measure variation in the weight gain or loss of your ewes on a maintenance ration. Use this to build resilience into your flock.
  • In a dual-purpose enterprise, it can be used for allocating Merino ewes or lambs into wool and meat groups based on production, ie. fibre diameter, fleece weight and body weight
  • Optimal number of ewes to mate to wool versus meat sires.
Reproduction
  • Consideration of reproduction rate on selection strategies
  • Capturing pregnancy status using eID
  • Optimal use of pregnancy scanning data – use to sort and manage ewes
  • Match ewe to her lambs using Pedigree MatchMaker
  • Measure litter weight weaned.
Parasite control
  • Use of selective drenching
  • Identify the poor performers in the flock, eg. which animals are more susceptible to flystrike.

What equipment do you need?

Before investing in equipment, decide on breeding and production goals for the flock. These will align to the key performance indicators (KPI’s) that drive profitability. Then decide what is needed to measure to achieve those goals, and only spend enough money to achieve those outcomes. A handheld reader and a manual weigh crate may be all that is needed.

In other situations, you may decide that equipment that helps make tasks quicker and easier is important for labour efficiency in the business. Choosing equipment that can be coupled with management software that uses recorded information to help make decisions when working with sheep such as autodrafting – like variable rate technology does for cropping is another option. Alternatively, equipment can be supplied by contractors, removing the need to buy it at all.

Commercial Practice

By knowing the pregnancy status of each ewe from one year to the next provides feedback for management and allows selection pressure to be applied. If a previously twin bearing ewe returns as single bearing the following year, then you may be able to change the way she is managed after lambing to provide her the best opportunity to conceive twins the following year.

If the season is tough and you need to reduce ewe numbers, rather than selling a whole age group, an option would be to sell all the ewes which have only conceived singles each year. This then turns a culling event that would have been a disappointing drop in ewe numbers, into an opportunity to improve the average lambing rate of your ewes.

Hannah Marriott, sheep farmer from Greta in north east Victoria, received a 2014 Nuffield Scholarship to research the ability of eID to deliver production benefits to sheep farms, with traceability as a bonus. She believes that while visual classing is important, it must be done in combination with objective measurement. To complete her studies Hannah visited New Zealand, the Middle East, America, Europe and Asia.

Hannah highlighted the following study findings:

  • To optimise IAM, KPI’s must first be identified, then the right measurements taken to achieve the biggest gains. KPI’s of greatest concern included kilogram of live weight produced, kilogram of wool, lambing percentage and lamb survival, particularly of twins.
  • Profit will only improve when the added-value resulting from the data is greater than the cost of collecting and processing it. Also ensure that the cost of culling is less expensive than the cost of keeping unproductive stock.
  • IAM allows a focus on the full range of animal performance data for selection, rather than the
    average. For example:
    – Under identical management, the top 25% of ewes can be more than twice as efficient as the bottom 25% of ewes. This means more precise selection pressure can be applied to achieve gains, by identifying those animals falling below the average on an economic measure.
    – It allows selection for multiple traits that are usually negatively correlated, eg. wool cut and reproduction. In fact, at a genetic level they are not intrinsically antagonistic, and both can be maximised simultaneously using objective measurement.
    – In a New Zealand feedlot example, twins were more competitive than singles for feed. Drafting for low weight gain separated the less competitive from the more dominant lambs, which dramatically increased the weight gains of slower growing lambs from under 200g/day to over 400g/day. Over time however, you’re likely to find these differences lessen as a new social structure is established between the new lamb group. The business may instead choose to sell off the slower growing lambs early, keeping the more efficient animals.
    – A New Zealand farm discovered half of their lamb kill was over-fat. Using IAM records they identified that most of the over-fat lambs were ewe lambs. They now finish the ewe lambs on plantain, while wether lambs are finished on clover.

These variations in efficiency and genetic relationships are impossible to identify using visual or mobbased selection only.

  • eID enables ewes to be matched to their lambs. From this, a weaned litter weight can be correlated to the ewe. A KPI, ewe efficiency index, can then be calculated using weaned litter weight and ewe liveweight. This also supports selection of other favourable component traits including fertility, lambs born, lamb survival, lactation and lamb growth rate.
  • On-farm, IAM requires a resource commitment and must be practical. Data collection needs to be integrated with the annual management calendar to be time efficient. Measurements that align with sheep husbandry activities include live weight and condition score, pregnancy scanning, age of the dam, sire group, sex of the lamb, lamb marking and weaning weight, matching ewe and lamb, and wool cut.
  • The need to combine on-farm productivity gains with end product specifications is more important than ever as the demand for consistently high quality, safe and ethically-grown food increases. Growers identify their lamb as a premium product, but are selling it as a commodity. Across the world, annual consumption of sheepmeat (including mutton) is only 1.9kg/person, so lamb is a product that is wanted, rather than needed. Lamb has a high cost of production, so the industry must get smarter and keep the science (objective measurement, genetics, and nutrition) to maintain eating quality and continue to sell the product at a premium. Back on-farm, Hannah is linking individual carcass feedback back to farm production, to ensure her production gains match market specifications.

Using eID doesn’t need to be an expensive exercise – understand what the business needs to measure, then only spend enough money to achieve these outcomes.

References

Agriculture Victoria, 2017, www.agriculture.vic.gov.au, ‘On-farm benefits of eID’.

Agriculture Victoria, 2017, www.agriculture.vic.gov.au, ‘Individual animal management’.

Marriott H., 2017, nuffield.com.au, ‘Individual Animal Management in Commercial Sheep Production’.

Acknowledgements

Research by the Sheep CRC, and Garry Armstrong, Agriculture Victoria.

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