Sheep producers may soon be able to boost flock efficiency as a three-year project begins development of a field based automated system to monitor lamb growth.
The project, which has received Defra funding of over £430,000, aims to develop a system which provides farmers with data to make accurate predictions to reach target finished weight.
The funding has been made to agri equipment firm Ritchie Agricultural, which says its system will provide information to help farmers in their feeding, grazing and breeding management decisions.
Overall, the technology seeks to help farmers to measure and monitor lamb performance, one of their most essential tasks, but one which currently has various limitations.
The system's auto-weigher will cut across those constraints and improve welfare by reducing the number of gathers and subsequent stress on the lambs which can stifle growth rates.
It is hoped Ritchie Agricultural's system will also make substantial labour savings.
Charlie Brown, of David Ritchie Agricultural, said: “The project will initially evaluate three different designs: a walk over weigher, a monitor with creep to incentivise throughput and platforms in a field for lambs to jump on. Each design will be accompanied by a data-handling app.
“For farmers feeding creep, the project will also develop a metered feed lamb weigher allowing a user adjustable amount of feed to be fed to individual lambs.
"This prevents the dominant animals from getting more than their share of feed and provides a restriction on intake of feeds which can prevent ill-health from over-feeding.”
The platforms will be researched on three innovation farms and one of Ritchie’s own trial farms, with lamb weight continually recorded from four weeks of age through to finishing to achieve a real time average for the flock.
Ritchie Agricultural will construct initial prototypes for each design of weigher and commission them on farm for validation.
Meanwhile, individual lamb weights will be transmitted over mobile phone networks to an online cloud database, processed and displayed on a web-based user platform.
The National Sheep Association (NSA) welcomed the project, saying it should reduce costs, save time and potentially improve health and welfare.
"NSA looks forward to this project progressing and providing industry input at the different stages of development," the group said.
