Feed ruminants

Description

The Ruminant Feed Activity is used to request feed for selected individuals in the ruminant herd from the Animal food store. Feed activities will be undertaken in the order they appear in the Activities tree starting from the upper most activity and working through all its branches first.

The ruminant feed activity uses a filtering approach to specify individuals in the herd and amounts to supply selected individuals allowing for management of specific groups of individuals. This allows the user to provide specific criteria for the individuals fed, such as lactating females, or female weaners, or any individuals between x and y months old.

Smart feeding

Some of the options available for feeding animals allow you to apply Smart feeding strategies whereby the farmer knows details of each animal's current food requirements at the time of feeding. This can be used to feed animals up to their remaining intake requirements (allowing for some overfeeding, see overfeeding below), or simply avoiding wastage from overfeeding when using feeding styles where the amount fed is calculated by other approaches such as a fixed amount, or an amount per kg live weight. One approach for using Smart feeding would be to feed the lowest quality or cheapest feed type last and up to the remaining intake to avoid under-feeding in the cheapest way possible. Smart feeding also allows a list of feeding activities with associated feed and animals, all with the Stop feeding when satisfied switch turned on, to be applied each month and the list will be performed in order until the animals are satisfied after which the remaining feeding activities will be skipped.

Parameters

The following parameters are used to define this activity

Feeding style

A number of feeding styles are provided to assist in determining the amount of feed to supply individuals.

Over feeding

A user defined value allowing overfeeding of individuals above their potential intake is provided in Ruminant type under the Advanced properties and the Diet section. This value only applies to the manual feeding styles (see those marked overfeeding possible above) that allow excess feed to be provided . This multiplier does not influence grazing intake calculations and will not consider any previous overfeeding when grazing is performed after manual feeding.

Required components

The following components are required to use this activity

Ruminant feed group

This component defines the individuals fed and the amount to be fed to this group. You can have any number of Ruminant feed groups under the feeding activity. There are two types of Ruminant feed groups depending on the level of monthly detail you need to supply.

In this example we wish to feed a supplement to the ruminant herd. To achieve this we add a Feed ruminants activity to the Activities holder and specify the Animal food store type to feed them. We will feed this supplement between July and October at a rate of 0.5 kg/day for females and 1 kg/day for males by setting the Feeding style to use to SpecifiedDailyAmountPerIndividual. Below the Feed activity we provide a Month range timer set from July to October. We then need to add two Ruminant feed groups with a Filter by property below each specifying males (parameter=Gender, Operator=Equal, Value=Male) and females (parameter=Gender, Operator=Equal, Value=Male). Alternatively, we could also use a Ruminant feed group (monthly) and only specify values to feed in the 7th to 10th values (representing July to October) with nothing (0) fed in the other months. If we also wished to feed this supplement to weaners in April and May we would need to add an additional Feed ruminants activity with appropriate timer and Ruminant feed group and Ruminant filter (parameter=Weaner, Operator=Equal, Value=True).

Additional components

The following components will add additional functionality to this activity

This activity provides the following identifiers: Number fed and Feed provided

This activity provides the following units for components: fixed, per head and per kg fed

If you require different timers for the different feed groups you will need to create a separate Ruminant feed activityRuminant for each time period required. All Ruminant feed groups within a Ruminant Feed Activity will obey the set of timer applied to the activity.

Reporting

This activity will report all transactions to a Resource ledger report with Animal food store if provided.

The values reported include the amount provided to the animals for consumption as well as entries for trampling wastage (Proportion lost due to trampling recorded as Wastage in ledger Category) and any feed provided above what the animals can eat (including increases based on the Overfeed Potential Intake multiplier, recorded as Overfed wastage in ledger Category).

Time-step timing of activity

This activity is performed during the Get Resources Required event of the setup and time-step events. This is the standard, monthly clock event by which CLEM activities request resources and perform actions based on the resources provided, therefore this activity will compete with most activities in the time-step with their location in the simulation tree determining the order they are processed (this includes activities located on other CLEM and Market components). If this activity relies on another activity having been performed, or other activities rely on this activity in the time-step, ensure it has been performed in the correct order based on it's position in the simulation tree.

Details

Feeding is undertaken on all individuals of the current herd considering any filter groups above the activity.

Activity status

The following status values apply to this activity and are shown in Activities performed report:

	blank	The activity was not considered in this time-step
	not needed	No individuals were fed or there was no food to feed
	partial	Only a portion of the required intake was provided
	success	All individuals were fed