Wean ruminants

CLEM.Activities.RuminantActivityWean

Perform weaning of ruminants.

Weaning is the separation of suckling offspring from their mothers. This will be undertaken by this activity when individuals reach the weaning age or weight specified. The weaning activity will be performed every time step unless a timer is added.

If the weaning activity is not performed, natural weaning will occur after the time period specified in the Ruminant parameters (or the gestation length after birth by default).

Weaning takes place during the herd management event. Therefore, a range of processes have been performed in the time-step before weaning such as suckling milk intake and growth. This means that even if a weaning age of 0 is set, the new born individuals will take milk in their month of birth and thus reducing milk available for milking activities before they are weaned.

If a mother dies, offspring currently suckling are NOT considered as weaned until they reach weaning age and/or weight as specified here. They will not have access to milk and will need to either switch to pasture consumption or have feed provided. There is no surrogacy in the model.

The following parameters are used to define this activity

This value defines the style of weaning rules to be used. Weaning can consider, age only, weight only, or age or weight in deciding when to wean individuals.

The age in months to wean individuals. A weaning age of 0 will result in weaning at birth (or in the first month)

The weight (kg) to wean individuals

The paddock/pasture to wean to 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 homestead for part of the year.

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 identifiers: Number sucklings checked and  Number weaned

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

Any Activity fee will include financial costs based on any specified identifiers and units and may limit the outcomes if supported and OnPartialResourcesAvailableAction set to UseAvailableWithImplications

Any Labour requirement will include labour allocation to perform this activity based on any specified identifiers and units and may limit the outcomes if supported and OnPartialResourcesAvailableAction set to UseAvailableWithImplications

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.

Weaning is undertaken on all individuals of the current herd considering any Ruminant activity groups above the activity.

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

Not weaned

You can further customise this selection by adding Ruminant groups with the identifier Number of sucklings checked

This activity is performed during the Animal mark event of the setup and time-step events. This ensures this activity is performed before Manage ruminants.

This activity will occur at the same time as Manage ruminant tag and Mark ruminants for sale so the order of these three components needs to be considered if they rely on actions of each other.

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 weaning was required
success Individuals were weaned based on age and/or weight
  partial Resource shortfalls limited the activity

See also