.png)
Queensland Country Life
AN APP that can tell you where your cattle are on your property, and be narrowed down to where cattle of certain weights are, in real time, is on its way to producers.
CQUniversity Professor of Agriculture Dave Swain said he hopes the technology will make real changes to beef producers’ day-to-day operations.
“Data Muster is an integration of data that is collected on a property from a variety of difference sources - walk over weighing, crush data – and brings that all together and provides data in a user-friendly way,” he said.
Prof Swain said the importance of collecting daily data could not be underestimated.
He said the dairy industry, which has more opportunity to collect data on individual animals at daily milking sessions, had successfully used that information to select the high performance cows.
“In the beef industry, performance of those animals are only recorded maybe once a year, what we are trying to do is get much more information so it can be used in a genetic improvement program, so you can really identify the elite genetics.
“If we were to monitor the whole of the northern beef industry and found all of those elite females, we could actually start really aggressively looking at overall performance of the whole industry.”
For producers, the app will provide the opportunity to know exactly where cattle are on their property to muster effectively, and to know how much weight is being gained by each herd.
Prof Swain said producers would be sought to partner with the project at the end of this year.
He said CQUniversity staff would set up the system and give producers a chance to trial it firsthand.
“So I think the biggest push that we’ve got is to try to get much better information on reproductive performance, whether that’s for management, or for genetics,” Prof Swain said.
“So some of the things that we’re focused on is getting date of calving.”
This will be particularly helpful for stud producers, but Prof Swain said the technology will be invaluable to both stud and commercial breeders.
Each producers’ access to the technology will be via a weblink which will include their own property maps.