Floating Farm Sinks
OPINION: The world's first floating dairy farm, once hailed as a vision of farming's future, is up for sale after seven years.
Labelled "Cool Beef", the four-year programme will explore the relationships between feed efficiency, methane emissions, and production traits. The aim is to come up with new breeding tools to produce cattle that reduce methane by utilising feed more efficiently.
The Ag Emissions Centre has come on board to fund the programme, which will be led by Beef+Lamb NZ.
Following about three years of pilot work, the programme was officially launched last week at the Te Mania Angus Stud on the North Canterbury coast near Cheviot, which will be one of the two main research sites, the other being Pāmu's Kepler farm near Taupo.
Speaking at the launch, Beef+Lamb chair Kate Acland said it has the potential to deliver practical benefits for New Zealand beef farmers.
"Understanding how efficiently cattle convert feed into production has real value for us in our farm businesses and that's what makes this programme so important."
The goal was to generate robust science and data needed to support future breeding tools.
Acland said that every farm has different breeding objectives, selecting animals for productivity, fertility or productivity.
"Cool Beef will build on that by exploring whether additional information around feed efficiency and methane traits can help support future breeding decisions."
She said that having breeders contribute animals for the research would ensure the results would be grounded in real New Zealand farming systems.
Dr Jason Archer, head of Beef+Lamb NZ Genetics, said the challenge was in balancing three things - feed efficiency (the relationship between feed intake and production); methane intensity (how many kilos of meat are produced per unit of methane); and how much methane is produced per kilo of feed eaten.
"That's something that we really want to work on."
Archer said there were many research questions to be asked.
"What's the opportunity to reduce methane yield and improve feed efficiency together? Is it one or the other or both? We obviously hope the outcomes are both."
Some of the methodology comes from the ongoing Cool Sheep programme, which started in 2006 with similar aims. That uses trailer-mounted Portable Accumulation Chambers (PACs) to measure individual animals' methane and other emissions by shutting animals in and monitoring gas levels over a short period of time.
Cattle-sized PACs have been installed at Te Mania and Kepler, with animals to be provided by Te Mania and Kepler and about another eight breeders around the country. The programme will work with Hereford, Angus, and Hereford-Angus crosses, because they represent about 80% of the national beef herd.
