Waikato University student helps LIC sort out the cows

23 May 2012

Waikato University student helps LIC sort out the cows

A summer studying cows has given a University of Waikato student an unparalleled insight into bovine behaviour.

Dushyant Parmar’s farming experience was pretty limited before he started working with farmer cooperative Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC), in the Protrack department over summer.

Now he’s something of an expert.

“New-borns will follow anything,” he says. “The teenagers are a lot more rebellious and like to do things their own way in their own time. And then there’s the older cows – they’re too lazy to be bothered trying to figure things out for themselves so they’re very compliant.”

Parmar, a mechanical engineering student was involved with the development and testing of LIC’s new Protrack Drafter product that uses an automated drafting gate.

Parmar did the work placement as part of his degree at the University of Waikato. The gate will be on show at one of two University of Waikato stands at Fieldays in June; the university is a strategic partner at Fieldays which this year runs 13-16 June.

The gate works like an extra pair of hands for farmers. Cows are fitted with an electronic identification tag, and a farmer pre-programmes which animals need drafting - during milking the automatic gate takes care of the rest.

Trials of the new Drafter took place at four Waikato farms and on one in the South Island. Parmar says the on-farm testing was invaluable. “In the field things happen you can’t anticipate. It’s where you see what’s really going on.”

Upgrades have been made to the milking screen in the Herringbone shed pit which instantly shows which cows have been drafted, which are due to be drafted and total draft numbers. Pop-ups also tell a farmer when a cow has reached the gate. “The user interface is a lot friendlier for farmers now,” Parmar says.

The gates can also separate animals into three different groups, allowing for greater efficiency.

A Protrack mobile app has also been developed which enables farmers to schedule drafts from the paddock. Once the farmer is in range of the wireless network on the milking shed the draft will synchronise with the Drafter PC. This means drafting can be organised ahead of time, and from anywhere on farm.

The accuracy of the system has also improved dramatically – from about 78% when Parmar first began trials to about 99% now. This improvement is due to ironing out early bugs in the software that were making the automated drafting gate underperform.

As for the cows, Parmar reckons it takes them about six months to get used to the system. “But eventually they all get it.”

For more information about Protrack Drafter visit www.youaskedforit.co.nz. For more information about the University of Waikato at Fieldays visit www.waikato.ac.nz/events/fieldays

ENDS

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