How Many Pounds? How Many Bites?
Tag readers in the GrowSafe equipment identify cattle by their radio frequency identifi cation (RFID) tags when they come to eat. A weighing system in the feed bins measures how much each calf eats. This data is used to determine feed effi ciency.
For the last 2 years, The Samuel R. Noble Founda-
tion in Ardmore, Okla., has used a prototype of the GrowSafe Feed Intake System to monitor the feed ef- fi ciency of herds. The technology helps identify animals that need less feed for growth and maintenance — a critical selective trait, since feed takes up 70 percent of the cost of producing cattle. Dr. Ryan Reuter, agricultural research specialist for
the foundation, says the equipment is manufactured by a Canadian company called GrowSafe Systems. Reuter explains, “There are feed bunks in a feedlot pen sitting on load cells, and they communicate with an RFID (radio frequency iden- tifi cation) tag that’s in the cattle. The system is able to identify which animal is at which feed bunk and weigh the feed bunk throughout the day, and it’s able to inventory feed out of the feed bunk to each individual animal in the pen automatically.” The Noble Foundation has collected a database
of 60,000 animal day/records from the system. The foundation is one of several users of the system around the world, some of whom have been compiling data with it even longer. Says Reuter, “We’re still in the start-up phase and
understanding all we can do with this system, what we can learn from it and what questions we can get answered with it. We’re excited about the research opportunities that having a tool like this lets us have.” He says most of the feed intake systems are being
The GrowSafe watering system provides similar information on water intake by each calf.
used for genetic evaluation of feed effi ciency in bulls. The overhead expense and cost of the hardware make it too expensive to be used by a commercial feedlot. But a second system developed by the company, GrowSafe Beef, is set up to monitor water intake of individual cattle. It weighs the cattle as they drink, so it generates data on daily body weight changes of cattle in a pen and can service many more cattle than can one of the feed intake systems. In a promotional video, Noble says, “GrowSafe
This Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation research project tracks every bite and every drink to monitor cattle feed effi ciency.
Beef provides producers with unprecedented, real-time capabilities to continuously and automatically track individual animals, control inventory and comply with traceback reporting, identify sick animals and poor performers, enhance animal well-being and mitigate risk, identify animals in need of treatment, determine when individual animals are ready for market, and measure and predict individual animal gain and market value.” Says Reuter, “GrowSafe’s intention, I believe, is
for the GrowSafe Beef system to eventually be a commercially viable piece of equipment that we can install in commercial feedyards… We can use the information that it generates to help us do a better job of managing cattle, and it returns value to the commercial cattle producer.”
78 The Cattleman September 2013
thecattlemanmagazine.com
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