Smart ear tags could soon alert beef producers to their cows calving

CQUniversity's Precision Livestock Management Professor Mark Trotter said the research involved taking data off smart tags and turning it into something useful for producers.

Generally, smart ear tags contain two sensors, a GPS and an accelerometer, similar to a Fitbit.

"When the data comes off it's literally just a GPS location of where an animal is in a paddock and lots of numbers, basically about its activity," Professor Trotter said.

"So it doesn't really mean much. It can be useful if you want to go and find your cows, if you're mustering or stuff like that...it's the patterns over time in that data that tells a whole heap more detail about what's happening to that animal.

"And one of the key things that producers are really interested in is having the ability to detect when a cow is calving and that's the focus of a lot of the research that we've been doing."

Prof Trotter said the reasons for wanting calving information varied depending on the intensity of a producer's production system.

"So if you are in, say central Queensland or southern Queensland, where you've got more higher value animals... a lot of people are starting to look into using these systems to detect the calving of heifers and high value animals so if there's a problem they can go out and intervene," he said.

"They can just go and check if that cow has had a calf and everything's okay.

"If you go further north where it's not really possible to check on the animal or intervene in any way, then it's really about recording over the whole season what's going on with your cows so you know which cow has maybe had a calf.

"So we can tell you that this cow calved, but maybe she didn't deliver that calf through to weaning so you can actually understand what's going wrong on your property in terms of things like calf loss.

"Or, maybe that cow never had a calf and she never went through the birthing process, so maybe she lost that fetus quite early on in gestation.

"So there's a few different applications depending on what sort of production system you're in."

Prof Trotter said the more advanced alerts in relation to calving on smart tags were still very much in the development stage.

Currently, the research work has involved trials of about 50-100 head of cattle at Belmont Research Station and Darren and Alice Marks' property, Winvic, Clermont, wearing collars that collect high resolution "research grade" data alongside the commercial sensor ear tags.

"We're pretty comfortable we can detect calving activities in those sort of environments, but if you go a couple hundred kilometres north or west under different production systems or different paddock conditions, we don't know how well it's going to work out there so there's a few little bugs yet to iron out in that space," Prof Trotter said.

CQU senior post doctoral research fellow Anita Chang started this research on calving alerts in 2018 as part of her PhD.

Prof Trotter said the dairy industry already had sensors working for them and it was simpler as dairy cattle were not that far away when calving.

He said the big challenge with this type of technology was in the red meat industry as its cattle were out in the middle of nowhere.

"And trying to get data off these tags is a bit of a challenge and that's why we're in the infancy (stage) with that," he said.

Prof Trotter said the first adopters of this technology were going to be producers with high value animals such as seedstock producers.

"The real value is that they can be notified automatically of a birthing event...and if they want to collect a calf weight they can run out and they know where to go to find that animal so there's some big efficiencies there and they are automatically starting to record calving dates as well," he said.

"In saying that, there are a lot of commercial producers out there that I am talking to who are also very keen to get it working in their heifers.

"They just want be able to monitor their first-calf heifers and if this was working and ready to go right now there would be commercial producers buying it for sure."

Prof Trotter predicted the technology could be commercially available in about 18 months to two years.

At Beef, CQUniversity will be running Ask an Expert sessions where producers can go along and ask questions of Prof Trotter and Ms Chang at the CQUniversity stand about the smart tags, how they can get involved in the technology and what tags to buy.