COWS who don’t spend much time with their calves may not be bad mothers and also the most productive females in the herd.
That’s one of the key outcomes so far from research underway on the 3260-hectare Belmont Research Station north of Rockhampton in central Queensland, aimed at cutting calf losses across northern Australia (up to 20 per cent in some herds).
The research on the Agforce-owned research station, once the home of the CSIRO’s tropical cattle research programs, is being managed by Central Queensland University.
PhD student, Chris O’Neill, under the supervision of Professor Dave Swain and Dr Kym Patison from CQ uni, has been monitoring behaviour in a herd of about 40 cows on calves using data from UHF close-proximity loggers.
He has found some cows engage in communal care of calves rather than individual care.
Cows with calves in these 'creches' can spend little time with their own calves but still rear healthy offspring and, because they spend more time eating, are ready to mate sooner than their more attentive sisters in the herd.
Mr O’Neill said some cattle producers had voiced concerns these creches could be feed stations for dingoes, but he believed that one bellow of alarm from a minder cow would quickly bring a group of angry mothers to defend their calves.
He was keen to discover if the tendency to create calf creches was a genetic trait or taught behaviour by alpha (dominant) females in the herd.
Mr O’Neill is also using data from NLIS tags captured on a walk-over-weighing race on the station (which the cows have to pass through to get to a water trough) to accurately match mothers and their calves (through their proximity while walking through the race).
Taggle technology
Another PhD student, Don Menzies, is working on research which involves the constant monitoring of the location each individual in the station’s beef herd (owned by a private cattleman who leases the property and provides stock for experiments) using Taggle technology.
Taggle ear tags allow for the tracking of individual cattle on a web-based map. The tags (weighing 21 grams, 12cms in length and powered by one C-size battery) ping every 15 minutes to a network of four 15-metre solar-powered towers on Belmont with the data collected and distributed, via a server in Sydney, back to the research station.
The information shows where the animals are grazing (for mustering and pasture management), whether any are missing (theft, wandering off) and provides alerts on animals which are stationary for periods of time (sick, calving or injured).
Taggle systems use low power wide area (LPWA) radio technology which is cost-effective and can handle the collection of data from a large numbers of devices. The annual cost at Belmont is estimated at about $7.72 per animal (3000 head running across 1500ha).
Dr Patison is also trialling the use of specially-developed Taggle tags inserted in a cow’s vagina, which is expelled when calving starts and provides an early warning alert to producers. The work is being supported by Meat and Livestock Australia.
