Move ruminants

CLEM.Activities.RuminantActivityMove

Moves individuals from their current location to another.

This activity is used to move individuals around a farm/property. Moving individuals can require labour resources. Once moved, animals are identified by the pasture they are present within, and will consume the pasture during the Graze ruminants activity. By using Timers you can provide Move activities to perform rotational grazing or move individuals for breeding or based on the pasture biomass or quality.

Individuals are assumed to be in the general property or yards until moved and have the location "Unspecified - general yards".

The following parameters are used to define this activity

The pasture represented by a Graze food store type is a managed paddock or field where individuals can be placed.

This entry is a drop down list of available Graze food store type resources of the Graze food store available for this simulation

An option to move to "Unspecified - general yards" is also available. This would be used to move animals back to the house or yards for part of the year. It is important to realise that animals in the general yards will not graze and must be fed using Feed ruminants activities.

This activity to move ruminants is required for a range of reasons and the different requirements mean that the timing of moving animals with respect to other actions in the time-step is critical. The value selected will determine the CLEM events when the activity will be performed.

This property allows you to specify the position within time-step to perform the move activity and has the following options:

EarlyClosedThis setting ensures the move activity is performed early in the time-step sequence and happens at the same time as CutAndCarry after pasture production but before any ruminant related timing events including breeding, and intake. This will ensure the specified animals are at the selected location for the time-step.

NormalClosedThis setting performs the move ruminants activity during the GetResources timing event which is where the majority of activities are performed. At this time the move activity will compete with other activities for resources (e.g. Labour and Finance) and the order in the tree structure will be considered. For example moving animals before grazing will ensure they graze at the required location.

LateClosedThis setting ensures the move activity is performed late in the time-step sequence and happens during the CLEMMarkAnimals timer event which is after all feeding, growth, death and milking, but before Manage herd, Stock, Sell, report summaries and ageing. This will ensure individuals are at the location for the start of the next time-step.

Take care to ensure the correct outcomes are achieved when moving animals by investigating various outputs and report. Due to the need to use different events to trigger actions when managing a herd you may find conditions are not as expected when moving individuals. For example weaning takes place before managing the herd so the weaned status can be considered, but this happens after the general GetResources event used by Move. Therefore, you cannot assume individuals have been weaned and castration applied in identifying individuals to move. This property resolves this issue by moving the timing of the move activity in the time-step.

It may be necessary to check that your move activity has works as expected and didn't cause any unforeseen issues. This is currently the only activity that allows the timing to be set at this level of detail. This was considered appropriate given the diverse reasons for using the move activity and the important reason that other activities such as Wean occur when they do in the sequence of tasks in a time-step.

This switch will place the selected individuals in the desired paddock at the start of the simulation. No labour is used for this option.

This parameter determines whether sucklings are moved with their mother regardless of whether they are contained in the ruminant filter criteria. Sucklings separated from mothers will have reduced intake as no milk is available. These individuals will start to include a potential intake of other feed such as grazed pasture (based on 2% of body weight if pasture is available), but must have appropriate activities available. Sucklings can be subsequently removed from their mother if a later move activity selects them.

This parameter will determine what action is taken if there are insufficient resources to perform this activity.

You can report an error and stop the simulation, skip this activity or use the resources available. See What to do when resources are limiting

The following components will add additional functionality to this activity

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

Adding a Labour requirement below this activity will mean that labour is calculated and required to undertake the task.

This activity will occur in every time-step unless timers are used to restrict this activity (see Using timers).

This activity will obey all Ruminant activity group in the simulation tree at and above it's location.

Only one instance of this component is permitted in each Activity.

All individuals of the current herd considering any filter groups above the activity will be moved.

This task will be performed on individuals meeting the following filter rules

Not at move to location

You can further customise this selection by adding Ruminant groups with the identifier Individuals to move

The individuals moved will be assigned the name of the pasture they are moved to in their Location property which can be accessed during filtering.

The value stored for each individual only uses the Name of the Graze food store type and not the full name including the Graze food store parent component separated by a full stop as shown in the drop down list above. For example, if you wanted to identify all individuals currently in the Native pasture (GrazeFoodStore.NativePasture) you would define the Location property as just NativePasture (e.g. (GrazeFoodStore.NativePasture). Note: including the full component path will result in no individuals returned.

 

This activity is performed in the same general event (CLEMGetResourcesRequired, see Events) as the majority of activities. This means the placement of this activity in the simulation tree will be important. Placing this activity above any Graze ruminants activity will ensure the animals have been placed on the specified pasture before they graze. Likewise, placing the activity after the Graze ruminants activity will result in movement happening after grazing. This even allows you to move the animals to the yards before grazing with one activity and move them back to pasture after grazing (skipped) and herd management to represent a muster. You will realise that in this month time-step you would have to hand feed the animals as they did not graze.

This is performed after breeding and pasture production.

This activity will take place along side other ruminant activities such as graze and feed to ensure labour is considered and animals can be in position relative to these other feeding activities and ready for any management, marking for sale, buying and selling.

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 moving was required
success

Individuals were moved

See also