Walk over weighing giving powerful results

Mr Emery, who's well-known in cattle production circles as a DAF beef extension officer, was one of the presenters at the inaugural Maranoa Ag Innovations expo at Roma on Wednesday, giving examples of technological adoptions and their benefits.

He's leading the Walk Over Weighing demonstration site at Echo Hills, 80km north east of Roma, which has been in operation since 2018.

Drought that year and the following one impacted outputs, where 200 crossbred weaner steers were placed in a paddock with the unit for each 12 month period, meaning they only had a three-month window each year, but even so, it was found that no one breed stood out and that the biggest differences in weight gains were within breeds.

Various insights into what was going on in the paddock were also captured, such as the amount of weight that was lost when it did rain, and the frequency with which stock came in to water.

"There was a particular animal there who came in once a day at a particular time, and others that drank at multiple times throughout the day," Mr Emery said.

When it eventually rained, in 2020, the decision was made to refocus the project onto tracking females, asking questions such as whether they could mother up cow and calf units by the way they utilised the scales and the weights the tags were showing.

Using Angus-cross cows, they could see that some maintained stayed fat after calving whereas others struggled with lactation, resulting a drop in body condition.

In the first year they had data from 95 calves, then 160, and in the latest results, 209 calves have had information recorded.

Mr Emery said they'd corroborated the results being fed to them via the WoW unit with visits to the paddock every seven to 10 days during the calving period, checking udders and estimating the birth dates of calves.

"We gave the calves NLIS and management tags at branding," Mr Emery said. "What we were seeing with our eyes stacked up very closely with the WoW data - 97 per cent of what we observed in the paddock matched up for birth date and cow calf units."

He added that northern producers were using units that could draft in order to select cattle with the optimal weight for live-export orders, without bringing them all into the yards and the weight loss that resulted.

Surface water gave the project some complications, when cattle weren't walking over the scales at the paddock's watering point.

Mr Emery said they'd since fitted the cattle in the project with smart paddock collars so they could also look at the grazing patterns of good and not so good doers.

Project collaborators are now working on a regional economic analysis, plus other extension activities that will help with business planning.