Technology offers whole new world for livestock farmers

Scottish red meat producers and processors may seem to be in one of the more traditional sectors of Scottish farming but the range of research and development now taking place is producing big challenges to their production systems.

And if they do not take up these opportunities they have been warned their industry could shrivel and decline. On the other hand, Alistair Stott, of the Scottish Agricultural College, stated that the adoption of new techniques and technology would improve production efficiency and profitability.

Stott, was speaking at a seminar in Perth organised by Quality Meat Scotland, highlighted a number of areas of research including where better diagnostic work on animal diseases can identify infected livestock and allow the farmer to take the necessary remedial action.

Some recent research had highlighted that some sheep breeders were, in the traditional way, spending more than half their time just looking at or walking through their flocks.

"This could be seen as non-productive time with no output coming directly from this activity but it could also be seen positively by the public, who would see it as farmers being prepared to spend time in checking the welfare of their stock."

One of the benefits of adopting new technology, he suggested, would be that sheep farmers might have time to manage three of four times their present numbers of sheep, but still with time to observe their stock, through having superior information on diseases and husbandry coming through computer information.

One advocate of the philosophy of "managing sheep rather than working with sheep" is Fenwick Jackson, who along with his father farms near Jedburgh, where they keep 2,500 ewes plus followers along with a 150-strong beef herd.

The family have spent a number of years working towards reducing the labour required to look after a large number of sheep including moving to wool shedding sheep that do not require an annual clip.

But he was most enthusiastic over an imported electronic reader of ear tags, containing information ranging from breeding background through to levels of worm resistance.

The data and the use of special sheep pens where 450 sheep per hour can be handled allows him to "stand and watch" while any operation is being carried out without the use of any labour other than sheep dogs.

In another example of how technology is moving into the livestock sector, Ivan Andonovic, from Embedded Technology Solutions reckoned that the use of livestock collars could transmit a massive amount of information.

He has been working on a project to help dairy farmers detect when cattle are ready to be inseminated but he believed the same collar could inform on whether any particular cow was lame or carrying a disease.