Ruminant Parameters

A set of parameters are required to describe each ruminant breed. Unlike properties relating to specific activities which are stored with the activity, these ruminant properties are used by a range of activities to determine how different breeds respond and are therefore stored in a central location for each breed. They are also critical for the functioning of the Ruminant, RuminantFemale and RuminantMale objects representing individuals in the simulation. The specific parameters needed depends on the breeds considered as well as the activities used in the simulation. For example, the different Ruminant growth activities each have different sets of parameters required as well as some shared parameters. Rather than request every possible ruminant parameter is defined, you can provide just the parameter sets needed. This approach ensures the model is scalable to easily implement new instances of an activity with different parameters in future without introducing confusion as to replicated parameters and which is being used by the model. The model will check that all parameters required by the activities in a simulation are available before starting. Fully parameterised Ruminant Types will also be provided given the specialist nature of setting all the values.

All ruminant parameters are provided in a single Ruminant parameters holder to be located as a child of each Ruminant type component in the Resources section. A number of sub-parameter components are then provided in the parameter holder. Some of these are used across activities (general, breeding, lactation) while others are activity specific (grazing, mortality, enteric methane). The ruminant growth activities contain the greatest number of additional parameters to supply all values to the various equations for energy and growth. The latest Grow ruminants (Protein and Fat) activity has it's parameters further broken down by additional sub-cateogories to replicate the naming convention of the equations of Freer et al., (2012) as used in other models such as GrassGrow and AusFarm.

The user interface will provide access to all properties at and below the selected parameter component in the simulation tree such that all properties are available from the Ruminant type component. These are divided based on the likelihood that the user will need to modify the values as well as by their general type. The parameter levels provided are farm, breed and core, with farm representing parameters that are likely required to describe the animals of farm, while breed refer to the parameters specific to a breed and only modified by a user building a new breed with advanced understanding of the animal production equations. Finally, the core properties are fundamental values for all ruminants or feed quality and will rarely, if ever, need to be changed but are included for full customisation. The level of expertise of the user can be set in the CLEM component using the User Type property which will define the level of access to properties across the whole simulation. This is useful to prevent users changing values that should not be changed and the user can be confident only the parameters suitable for them will be offered. The use level is not locked and can be changed by the user at any time.