Ruminant type

The ruminant sub-model used by CLEM allows for the simulation of a wide range of ruminants using the one component. This resource represents an individual ruminant species (e.g. cattle, goats, sheep or buffalo) or a breed (e.g. BALI SPA or Bos indicus). This component holds all the ruminant coefficients that describe the growth and breeding of the individuals (see Ruminant Parameters) and controls the initialisation of the herd and tracking of current prices.

The Ruminant Type breed parameters are located in the Ruminant parameters holder component that is provided as a child of this Ruminant Type and manages all parameters. This parameter holder benefits from a tree based grouping of parameters to help you easily locate the parameters of interest. The parameters are further grouped by those you will likely need to change (Farm), those modified for breeds (Breed), and those that should only be modified by Advanced users (Core). All the currently parametrised ruminant types can be obtained from the CLEM toolbox which provides an easy means of finding the most similar ruminant and modifying the parameters provided. (See Managing model components to get these into your simulation tree).

Herd name

The name of this component in the simulation tree is used to identify the herd. Breed name will be provided by the Breed property in Ruminant parameters general. It is the name of the component in the tree that will be provided in drop down lists for managing ruminants in your simulation. For example, there may be a breeding herd and trade herd used in the simulation. These could be named "Breeding" and "Trade" in the tree, but both use the parameters for Bos indicus and would use copies of the same component (from a toolbox or another simulation) and these would have this breed property set to "Bos indicus"

The following components are required to set up this resource

Initial cohorts

The Initial cohorts component is used to define the number of individuals in the herd at the start of the simulation.

conception

Each Ruminant type component requires conception details to be supplied. There are currently three different means of calculating conception rates based on the previous IAT and NABSA models and a new method taking advantage of the individual-based herd model (see Ruminant conception for details).

The following components will add additional functionality to this resource

Animal pricing

The Animal pricing component is required if you are undertaking any activities relating to buying or selling stock and have Finances included in your simulation resources.