More than 50 producers took part in the field day, which was jointly hosted by CQUniversity and AgForce.
Together with the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, the organisations have formed the Central Queensland Livestock Centre of Excellence, which aims to increase cattle research in the region featuring greater producer participation.
CQUniversity Professor Dave Swain said the field day was an important step in demonstrating the latest animal monitoring technologies and land management systems, as well as gather feedback from producers on challenges they would like to see addressed in future research projects.
"The CQ Livestock Centre of Excellence has been built on the premise of putting the producer at the centre of research activities so that they can participate in projects and guide their direction," Professor Swain said.
"We believe this will result in more practical solutions to production problems and ensure they are tested in real-world operating conditions.
"CQUniversity's agriculture research is all about working with producers and industry to solve real world problems and provide solutions that will make a difference to their productivity and profitability,.
"This is why we included demonstrations of our latest research projects, a small trade fair to include a wider representation of industry groups, and we will be conducting an open forum to hear from producers about the issues they would like us to tackle in the future."
The event featured included a small trade fair to connect producers with research and extension agencies, an open forum to hear from producers about the production issues they addressed in the future, and a series of field demonstrations of new automated livestock management systems.
It also covered addressing calf loss using calf alert and other on-animal sensors, automated phenotyping for BREEDPLAN, using walk-over-weigh and DataMuster, auto-drafting for targeted supplementation.
Producers were also shown the use of paddock-based autodrafters to segregate calves for in-field animal health treatments and improved animal welfare and understanding water use and water quality for cattle productivity and riparian zone management.
Alan Welburn
Lover of sport, particularly horse racing and all things Olympic. Have spent my entire working life in journalism, mostly with News Corp on its major metro mastheads. Done plenty of things but the best by far is having a teenage son who calls me dad.
Lover of sport, particularly horse racing and all things Olympic. Have spent my entire working life in journalism, mostly with News Corp on its major metro mastheads. Done plenty of things but the best by far is having a teenage son who calls me dad.
