What's new

• Reports generate errors when there is a space in the reporting variable or event. Replace [Resources].Ruminants.Bos indicus.Property with [Bos indicus].Property in the report section. This issue is currently being addressed by APSIM and assumes appropriate naming and location in the tree structure where the name of the component in square brackets will be the first match while searching the tree structure.

• Added Body Condition Score property to Individual ruminant

• Fixed Graze food store type to work with a single pool. i.e. all input is lost each month to allow total pasture stand as input for user.

• Fixed Null error in mate value property of Attribute individuals

• Allowed one or two tailed selection from normal distribution for Set attribute with value assignment

• Fixed broken link to help page.

• Don't report Ruminant herd summary if the herd is empty and avoid null object error that occasionally occurs

• Refactor of code for all resource transaction to improve memory use

• Removes no pricing warning from Buy and sell ruminants

• The impact of crude protein (CP) on digestion, energy relations and growth was not being applied. We are still investigating the best approach for handling the impact of CP supply. The model now implements a reduction in energy from intake by around 23% when consuming the poorest pasture with Dry Matter Digestibility (DMD) of around 42% (the same as NABSA).

• Issues identified with loading ruminants onto multiple trucks addressed. Improved Descriptive summary reporting for trucking.

• No longer ignores activities or timers that are not needed in the Activities performed report but shows empty row with a warning in setup column

New features

• The HTML (web browser) version of the Activities performed report now includes status messages as tooltips (displayed when ouse cursor hovers over cell) identified by a red triangle in the upper right corner of the cell

Fixes a few identified bugs

• Incorrect calculation of minimum and maximum labour rates for AsRatePerUnitsAllowed in Labour requirement

• Removed error reported when no pasture is available in ecological indicator period is one month

• Fixed to include OnErrorAndStop or Skip when shortfall of land during manage pasture initialisation

While checking issues with labour allocation across multiple hired people some issues were detected and the labour allocation process was found to be confusing to the user.

• Checked and fixed labour allocation in Labour requirement

• Improved labour required property descriptions and added tool tips that are available for clarification in the user interface

• You may need to reset the Labour limiter style of Labour requirement from perUnitAllowed to the new AsRatePerUnitsAllowed wherever set.

• Removed extra "full stop" (.) at end of transaction category from labour allocations

• Fixed linkage of resource type specified in Manage external resource multiplier to Manage external resources

• Changed Resource shortfalls report to report required and available rather than provided as provided is often 0 at the time of presenting errors

• Updated shortfall status reported for labour shortfalls

The Apply trucking component used in Buy and sell ruminants has undergone a full code check and improvements to meet user requirements. This section had never been fully implemented and was causing some issues for the couple testing users. This component now fully supports the Insufficient resources available action with implications for individuals transferred by the parent buy/sell activity. Advanced simulations where resource limitations below a trucking component will not feed back through the trucking component and onto the buy/sell activity as this requires a full reallocation of individuals to all available trucks with the new limits considered, but the accounting of resources is correct prior to needed reallocation. This will be implemented as required.

Management of both buying and selling tasks in the one instance of the Buy and sell activity was resulting considerable duplicate code and becoming increasingly difficult to manage. For this reason the act of managing purchases (buy) or sales (sell) is now specified by a new ActivityStyle property and you will require separate instances of Buy and sell ruminants to manage purchases and sales.

Fixes

• Improvements made to the descriptive summary display

• Fixed wrong "Not needed" status displayed for Pay expense

• Added the Manage external resource multiplier component and filter property missed from the last upgrade

Fixed

• Report pivot and Report query components were generating errors when no database had been created (or empty datasource) and an Experiment run is performed. These reports now generate their database View after the experiment multiple simulations are complete and the database has been written

• Added missing filter identifier for Manage ruminants and renamed filter names for clarity. If you have been using custom filters to further restrict animals in manage ruminants, you may need to change the value selected.

Improved functionality

• The sale of weaners is now possible for enterprises needing to sell/agist weaners

• The Pasture pools report has been updated to remove the need for custom code to define properties reported. This report has been updated to include a range of pasture-based, and pool-based reporting properties as well as switches to report in tonnes (rather than kg) and per hectare.

• Ruminant herd summary now includes a group by Sex and Class which will include sex for Report pivot. Please ensure your group style setting is correct after the new entry was added to the list. This will affect age-based grouping.

• Fixes to avoid errors on creation of database views from some Report query and Report pivot, especially when no database is created.

• All ruminant reports now validate the Graze food store type specified to place individuals in where appropriate.

• Fixed Pasture data reader SQLite when working with Rainfall shuffler

• Allow multiple Relationship with the same name to display graphs in descriptive summaries

Additional bugs reported from the identifiable component (end of development) release are provided here.

• Pasture quality was not provided to ruminants and so pasture energy was limited

• Fine tuning of applying growth and potential intake calculations to sucklings, orphans, weaners and all other individuals.

• New Grazing efficiency report provided

The Transaction category functionality has been improved. This functionality was never fully completed. You now have control over automatically generating Transaction categories from the tree structure, even using component names, and reporting category levels as separate columns in Resource ledger report with user-specified column names.

This upgrade also provides the following fixes and improvements:

• Issue where no last harvest tag provided for rotational cropping

• Improved pasture management when using Manage crop method. Now allows multiple Manage crop product to point to single Graze food store type as long as using timers to ensure only a single activities is used in any time step.

• Fixed initialisation of pasture biomass when using Manage crop product (only first of multiple instances fort he same Graze food store type will initialise)

• Fixed issue with Ruminant feed group not working correctly after previous upgrade introducing Companion components

• Included ecological indicator reporting in pasture managed by Manage crop product (e.g. utilisation)

• Improved reporting of shortfall in pasture grazed from both required and desires levels (were reduced by tropical pasture quality)

• Removed unneeded "available" column from Resource ledger report

• Fixed switch to allow losses to be reported as negative values in Resource ledger report

• Updates to many Relates to reporting values with unneeded entries removed

• Missing entries of Activity or Relates to now reported as NULL in Resource ledger report

This upgrade represents the final changes made to the development process and implements the generic activity approach with access to fees, labour and identifiers linked to parent activities. For this we introduce the concept of Companion components to provide more functionality to your activities.

While we have tested each component the significant code changes in this upgrade may have introduces some issues that will need to be addressed.

Upgrade of activities and use of fees and labour

• During this process every activity is being refactored to the new approach and fully checked. This new style will remove drop down options that do not relate to the activity. This update will also make adding new features easier in future and simplifies performing activities in clock events other than GetResources
  • Most ruminant activities (where appropriate) now allow Pay herd fee and Labour requirement based on the numbers (fixed, per head and even per AE) of animals used in activity
  • GrazeAll, GrazePasture, GrazePastureHerd - updated and fixed bug limiting pasture eaten by sucklings off milk
  • The model now determines what activities must supply a Ruminant group (i.e. you must specify which individuals the activity will act upon) and also where the default filtering is assumed (see help of each activity for details). This ensures you are aware of the individuals being processed in activities such as Mark ruminants for sale and Manage ruminant tag where you will need to add an empty Ruminant group in order to specify the entire herd is requested.
  • A new OnPartialResourcesAction UseAvailableWithImplications allows the shortfall of resources such as labour and finances to reduce the activity where available.
  • Full upgrade of Descriptive Summaries to account for all changes

New features

• Now implements seasonal offset in Rainfall shuffler
• Added filters and timers to link to existing timer, ruminant and labour filter groups component to reduce duplication
• A new Activity Fee replaces the previous Resource, Labour and Ruminant fee components
• Arrange ruminant purchase replaces the old Trade activity and relies on Mark ruminants for sale to arrange sales for trade herds
• New Greenhouse gas emission can be added to a number of activities to produce emissions.

Improvements

• Improved Apply trucking for transporting ruminants with custom truck and trailer configurations and multiple trucks for sales and purchases
• Added new MonthsSinceWean and MonthsSincePurchase properties of ruminants.
• Cut and carry limiter is now Carry limiter to allow for use across a range of weight limited activities
• Access to, and identifying Relationships in activities
• Ability to specify whether you want to perform stocking and destocking tasks in Manage ruminants to allow destocking and restocking to be performed at different times.

• Fixed issue identified with incorrect pricing being applied to Ruminant purchases and sales.
• Fixed bug where using Take and Skip components on a Ruminant group returned no individuals (when style set to TakeIndividuals)

• Fixes an issue where Transmute ByPrice and Direct were not working properly. Please let us know if this causes any issues with your transmutations.
• Allows interval of 1 (monthly) for Interval timer. Note, this is effectively the same as not having this timer.
• Minor labelling improvements to property labels
• Fixes issue where validation issues did not raise and error and stop simulation.

• Fixed issue with castration task missed in some months
• Changed the timing event of HumanFoodStoreTypes in Feed people to targets
• Fixed typos and improved descriptions

• Fixed incorrect sale of breeding sires when adjusting the herd at start up
• Updated the sale reason property used in Mark ruminants for sale. This replaces the current MarkSaleReason property with a HerdChangeReason property to avoid conflicts in future. A check will be performed to ensure you select a sale reason.
• You will have to reassign all sale reason fields in Mark ruminants for sale activities of your simulation
• Updated description of minimum size for first mating (proportion on SRW) for clarity
• Updated help to reflect previous removal of the overhead switch property in Pay expense
• Removed redundant Category property from Ruminant herd cost as now uses TransactionCategory

• Fixes error selecting not ready for breeding females to report and therefore ensures full accounting in conception status report.
• Randomises pregnant females for conception to avoid list order issues

• Checked and fixed conception reporting (easy analysis of birth and weaning rates)
• Checked and fixed reporting of male attributes and ignore missing values to better herd outputs
• Various improvements to descriptive summary to report on new features
• Added Ruminant group styles that allow for custom filtering and selecting of individuals in management decisions. For example selecting breeders to sell to reduce her, or the order in which individuals are identified as replacement breeders (i.e. by condition or genetic merit).
• Further check and validation of Breed ruminants and Manage ruminants
• Added switch to allow you to turn of return of pregnant females from max age sale pool when breeders needed.
• Further validation checks and general CLEM user experience improvements
• Updates and fixes to relating to new icons

This upgrade provides improvements to the new approach for filtering individuals

• Simulation time has been reduced to 25% of previous versions providing benefits for those simulating large herds
• Validation has been improved to assist with setup and trap more issues to avoid unhelpful error messages
• A default value to be used in SortByAttribute has been added to apply when the specified attribute is missing from an individual
• A filtering example with reporting of testing performed is now included in Examples/CLEM

Various minor fixes

• Mark ruminants for sale now requires a Ruminant group to identify individuals to mark. An empty Ruminant group is now needed to request the entire herd for the task.
• Some typos and wording addressed in Descriptive summaries and warnings

The model now allows the mandatory individual Attributes of sires used in controlled mating to be randomly obtained from the existing herd, resulting in no herd improvement if sufficient sires are used in mating. This is achieved by omitting the Set attribute with value component from Controlled mating

This upgrade also includes some improvements to the Set previous conception and descriptive summaries.

This upgrade represents the full release of CLEM with all initial functionality and user requests implemented and a significant re-factor of the code-base for readability by advanced users and improved simulation performance. This upgrade provides stricter warning and error notification and you may find previously unreported issues need to be addressed before running your simulation.

Please report any issues or unexpected behaviour.

Additional changes and fixes included:

• New Attribute Summary Report
• Updated Herd summary component allows the herd to be grouped by age (years, months) or the ruminant class.
• The Gender property of ruminants, other animals and labour has been renamed Sex. FIX apsimx simulation in user interface: The new Sex entry will need to be assigned to all males in Ruminant initial cohort and Specify ruminant components. You will need to replace Gender and GenderToString() with Sex in all custom reports and Report query and Report pivot components where used. Delete your database file [simulation file name].db and run your simulation.
• A bug found in the Resource balances report when reporting ruminant adult equivalents has been fixed
• Memos are now formatted in descriptive summary
• Moved Maximum age for mating from Ruminant type parameters to Controlled mating as this is a management decision not a property of the animal. There is no upper breeding age for natural/uncontrolled mating. FIX: If using this property, you will need to set it in your controlled mating component. Controlled mating now also includes a Number of joinings per male property for use with genetic simulations.
• Fixed bug where some transmutation resulted in infinite resources
• Female breeders now contain property of last mating style
• Upgraded Labour requirements report to work with latest developments
• Possible uncontrolled mating warnings are shown in Descriptive Summary when settings allow them
• Faster animal pricing code
• More errors now include the parent component name to assist where common named components are used
• Move ruminants activity (and Ruminant herd report) no longer assume all animals when a Ruminant group is missing. You now at least need to add a Filter Group with no filter components to move all individuals. Fix: add filter groups to all Move activities.
• The initial biomass property of Manage pasture has been moved to the Graze food store type to allow initial pasture biomass at setup to be offered when using the simple approach. This component also includes some additional properties to assist with calculating initial biomass pools that were previously hard-coded. Fix:move your initial biomass value from the Manage pasture to the Graze food store type component. You can leave the other values with the default settings appropriate for northern Australian seasonal pasture production.

An important aspect of the model is the ability to select individuals (currently ruminants and labour) from the whole population upon which to perform an activity. This functionality is being redeveloped to allow filtering on any property or method (without arguments) associated with the individual allowing full customisation and detailed management decisions to be applied. The new changes also include sorting of the group upon which to act allowing activities to select individuals ordered by value (e.g. sell those for poorest body condition first). Filtering and Sorting also apply to Attributes either whether they exist or not, or by the value associated with the attribute tag.

You can also specify the number of individuals to be returned using the Take from filtered component. This is now available in all filter groups and the previous Proportion property of some filter groups has been removed. FIX in UI: You will need to add a Take from filtered component below any filter group where you were previously returning a set proportion.

FIX apsimx file in text editor:

Replace all concurrences of .RuminantFilter, and.LabourFilter, with .FilterByProperty,. Save the file and open it in the upgraded APSIM.

FIX apsimx simulation in user interface:

You will then need to reset the Property used, Operator (<, >, =, >=, <=,) and Value to compare properties for all of your filters. Use the backup of your Summary information Descriptive Summary (see top of page) to see the previous settings.

The Resource balances report has been updated to provide new economic properties and a better user interface.

FIX: You will have to re-specify the resource groups to report in the new Resource groups property of Resource Balance providing as a comma separated list of names of groups in the entry box in the user interface.

When reporting Ruminant transactions with the Resource ledger report you will now have an animal Class (e.g. calf, weaner, breeder...) column provided.

FIX: You will have to re-specify the resource group to report in the new Resource group property of Ledger Report from the drop-down list provided in the user interface.

The help system now contains a full description of all the Individual ruminant properties and methods that you will be able to use in upcoming filtering or your own custom reports. In doing so the Ruminant individual has been cleaned up. A new Sex property replaces Gender (will be removed in future after you have done changeover) and SaleFlag returns the value without need for SaleFlagAsString method.

Memos included in your simulation tree are now reported in your Descriptive Summary

The previous Relationship tracker has been removed. You will need to provide a Relationship with Relationship running value component to provide this functionality.

Removed CustomSQL and PivotTable as they are replaced by Report query and Report pivot respectively.

The model now includes a castrate switch (CastrateGrowOutMales in Manage ruminants) when separating young males. These individuals will have an Attribute named "Castrated" that can be used for filtering or you can use the updated IsCastrate and IsSire properties. As expected castrated individuals cannot breed.

The model better handles disabling components (especially Finance) by not enforcing any limits on purchasing and transmutations.

New properties have been added to the Resource ledger report including the Style of the report defining whether to include gain & loss columns or transaction type and amount columns. You are also now able to specify whether you want to include additional price and unit conversions with your transaction details and whether the losses should be reported as negative values. The tab structure of the display has changed to allow for these changes and hide unneeded entry screens.

This upgrade also addresses a couple of bugs that were reported after the latest changes to the user interface such as missing property tabs and scrollbars on CLEM components.

• Updated Resource Transactions to report style (Gain or Loss) and amount for each transaction for use with pivot style analysis of Resource ledger report. Gain and Loss Columns remain the default style for Ledger reports
• Activities performed report now correctly creates the HTML version when selected
• A property MarkedForSaleReason is provided in Mark ruminants for sale activity so you can apply some of the sale flags to your selection

This upgrade implements a number of background code changes needed for CLEM components to use the upcoming APSIM user interface. You will now be able to switch to the updated property presenter (see home/settings) which will soon become the standard across all APSIM Next Generation. This upgrade also improves the presenting of reports in html for display in a browser during your CLEM simulations, relating particularly to the Activities performed report and Labour requirements report. Please report any issues you find in using the new interface.

Happy New Year CLEMsters. We hope 2021 is full of whole farm modelling.

A new html (web-based display) version of the Activities performed report is now available to view your web browser. A number of users have appreciated being able to have the Descriptive summaries open in another application window allowing APSIM UI to remain in the Properties tab. This approach now applies to the new version of the Activities performed report with new properties such as auto create on run and rotate allowing you to simplify the creation of reports and display the activities across the columns in the html view. All these new properties are available in the user interface. The performance in creating all html descriptive summaries has been significantly improved and the CLEM component now includes a switch to create a full descriptive summary of the simulation when performed (look for the simulation file name with a .html extension). Links to both the relevant help page and the html summary files are now provided in the Summary tab for each component rather than the previous formatted summary. The Labour requirements report now also provides a html report and works again in the UI display.

A number of changes were needed to standardise and add additional functionality to the Ruminant components' properties. The sire property has now been renamed IsSire in line with IsBreeder and IsWeaner, and the previous, strict definition of a heifer has been changed to something more generalisable to a range of ruminants (weaned, up two 1st pregnancy or specified age) with the term PreBreeder replacing Heifer term throughout the model and all reporting categories. FIX: This change will need all custom SQL scripts and reports to be updated, and is automatically handled in CLEM specific ledgers. A new Health score property has been added that reports a range from -2 (under-weight leading to death) through 0 (normalised weight for age) to +2 (maximum weight for age possible) as an index of current body condition. We are planning on developing reports to track the general health of your herd through time, but this property can be added to all reports now.

Their have been a number of significant changes to the operation of the Manage ruminants activity to help with managing small-holder herds and fix a number of bugs identified. One of these was to rearrange the properties within categories in the display, while also adding female specific growing out age and weight targets as well as pasture location. "Growing out" of heifers has been significantly improved along with the maintenance of minimum and maximum number of breeders through time. A number of warnings have been added to ensure filters a correctly targeting individuals to remove (e.g. reduce breeders cannot include males)

A bug was fixed in Feed ruminants where the activity was reported as successful when no animals were fed rather than Not Needed.

Herd costs no longer allow a value of 0 as this should be achieved by disabling the component if not required.

The Managing crops section and help has been improved to better reflect the range of cropping styles and how to set them up in CLEM by including a single farm crop in a field as an example.

Improved speed performance when loading large pasture data-cubes in advanced grazing.

Various typos and minor fixes and improvements, especially in descriptive summaries have been addressed.

New filterable properties provided from Ruminants

Due to an update in the programming language framework used by APSIM Next Generation we are no longer able to provide the graphically formatted display of versions, messages and descriptive summaries within the APSIM user interface. Component versions and the messages (errors, warnings and information) from the last simulation (Messages in CLEM component) are now provided as text.

The descriptive summary can now be viewed in a web browser with the link provided in the summary tab. We may add the ability for this to automatically update as you select components in future (let us know if you'd like this feature), but for now you will have to refresh the browser to update the details. This allows you to have a separate window showing your setup while working primarily with the Properties tab.

A full summary of the all settings and messages from your most recent simulation will be provided soon as either a html or pdf file.

Greater functionality has been added to Sell resource activity to help you define how resources are sold through a new SellStyle property and an associated Value.

FIX:You will need to check that all Resource sell activities are correctly set after upgrading. This will involve setting the Selling style and changing the Value from 0 (default) to the required amount (see Sell resource activity)

The Manage ruminants activity currently performs many tasks including the management of the breeder and sire numbers (including at start-up), selling old breeders and sires and managing the sale of young males and females when they reach specified age or weight. It is realised that this may be too many tasks for a single activity when the user wishes to separate the timing of such aspects or apply different rules for selecting individuals. As the Mark ruminants for sale activity provides greater flexibility when managing the sale of specified individuals (e.g. dry breeders, steers, old breeders), this change to CLEM allows the user to manage the marking of individuals for sale using the Mark ruminants for sale activity and disable the various implementations of this performed in manage ruminants activity, leaving this activity to handle only the management of breeder numbers.

You should not need to change any simulation files. Ensure that the new "mark for sale" switches automatically set in your simulation are appropriate.

If there is sufficient interest we could provide a simpler Manage ruminant breeders that is a cut-down version of the larger version and assumes that the user will provide Mark ruminants for sale activities for the sale of all individuals.

New functionality has been added to input (buy) or output (sell) any resource* external to the farm simulation provided as input data using a Resource data reader and the Manage external resources activity. This activity can also include financial and labour constraints on the transactions.

* this does not currently support Land, Labour, Graze or Ruminant resource types.

• Fixed invalid help links, typos and Manage ruminants status not updated on MaxAgeSale
• Default relationship now 0,0
• Allow Cut and carry activity to use herd to define amount
• Removed weight loss due to birth. Although energy is consumed to grow a fetus, this weight is never added to the mother's weight and so it is erroneous to subtract birth weight from breeder at birth.
• Fixed additional milk production calculation to ensure milk outputs match
• Added calling activity name to the ledger entry for a transmutation
• All activities creating greenhouse gas emissions now include properties to specify the Greenhouse gas type store in which to place the emissions. The model will default to using the previous approach of automatically using stores named Methane, CO2 or N2O if found. The new approach alerts you to the previously hidden link to greenhouse gas processes.

The following changes and improvements have been made:

• Properties requiring a month of the year now use a drop down list rather than integer number (No change needed to simulation file)
• The renamed Ruminant group replaces the previous RuminantFilterGroup and RuminantDestockGroup. Multiple Ruminant groups can now be applied to activities that support multiple groups (see Move, Destock, Manage). This change will require changes to your simulation file. FIX:Open your simulation apsimx file in a text editor (e.g. notepad) and search for Models.CLEM.Groupings.RuminantFilterGroup and Models.CLEM.Groupings.RuminantDestockGroup and replace with Models.CLEM.Groupings.RuminantGroup. You will also need to set the new Proportion property of the Ruminant group to 1 for all existing Ruminant Groups.
• A new Ruminant activity group is now used to define simulation level ruminant filtering for a range (branches or folders) of activities. This was previously achieved with the Ruminant Filter Group. Most simulations will not be using this functionality, but if you have you will need to change Ruminant Filter Groups with the new Ruminant activity group throughout the simulation tree (see Ruminant groups)
• A new range of Ruminant filter options have been provided and use the IsState() naming convention. These include the new IsWeaner, IsCalf, IsSire, IsSteer, IsCastrate (future implementation) as well as previous IsPregnant, IsBreeder and IsHeifer.
• A new Category property of Ruminant is available for reporting (see Ruminant herd report). This will report the category of an individual (Calf, Weaner, Heifer, Steer, Breeder, Sire, Castrate).
• Inferring pregnancy status and initial herd size at start-up have been improved, to include prenatal mortality and consider heifers toward breeder numbers respectively.

Changes were made to simplify using Relationship. These included moving the functionality that tracks of a value based on the relationship to a new component. This is currently used in grazing simulations to track Grass Basal Area and Land Condition in Manage pasture when using modelled pasture production data with the Pasture data reader SQLite.

The specific relationship used to determine Adult Equivalents under Labour has been removed and now uses the Relationship component with "AE" included anywhere in the component name for identification.

These changes will cause APSIMX files including the adult equivalent, GBA and LandCondition relationships to cause an error and stop when you try to open them. You will need to perform the following changes on the apsimx file in a text editor before opening the simulation.

FIX Adult Equivalent relationship:Find Models.CLEM.Resources.LabourAERelationship in the apsimx file opened in a text editor (e.g. Notepad).

Replace Models.CLEM.Resources.LabourAERelationship with Models.CLEM.Relationship

A few lines below (below XValues, YValues... NameOfYVariable), DELETE the rows starting StartingValue, Minimum, and Maximum.

FIX Grass Basal Area and Land Condition relationships:Search for Models.CLEM.Activities.Relationship in the lines below where these were located you will find Name with an entry such as GrassBasalArea and LandCondition to confirm you have the correct location.

Replace Models.CLEM.Activities.Relationship with Models.CLEM.RelationshipTracker

Beta release.