Twins Of The Pasture Crack And Patch
Harbin Pelletier
Another problem with twins is that even if the cow can feed both calves, she sometimes will not notice that only one calf has followed her, leaving the other somewhere in the pasture. This understandably drives a rancher crazy!
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Domain adaptation is important in agriculture because agricultural systems have their own individual characteristics. Applying the same treatment practices (e.g., fertilization) to different systems may not have the desired effect due to those characteristics. Domain adaptation is also an inherent aspect of digital twins. In this work, we examine the potential of transfer learning for domain adaptation in pasture digital twins. We use a synthetic dataset of grassland pasture simulations to pretrain and fine-tune machine learning metamodels for nitrogen response rate prediction. We investigate the outcome in locations with diverse climates, and examine the effect on the results of including more weather and agricultural management practices data during the pretraining phase. We find that transfer learning seems promising to make the models adapt to new conditions. Moreover, our experiments show that adding more weather data on the pretraining phase has a small effect on fine-tuned model performance compared to adding more management practices. This is an interesting finding that is worth further investigation in future studies.
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Personally, I had a stallion who was pasturebreeding and we found him with a fractured femur and he had to be put down. Never was sure if it was a mare, or trip when he dismounted, or even absolutely nothing to do with breeding, but it scared me enough to not want to try it again.
I am not criticizing your arrangement, Canterbury. I do have a question, though. How do you guard against twins? I assume that when pasture breeding, you do not know if a mare double ovulates. Do you do pregnancy checks a certain number of days after seeing a mare bred? If not, how do you know if a mare has conceived twins and eliminate one?
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Our breeding varies quite a bit from most as we do two covers twice a day for three days straight (or as long as the mare will stand - some more some less). With this particular mare, we did the in hand breedings, then afterwards, we turned them out together all day and night in a five acre field. Normally he is very enthusiastic about breeding, and he did one cover the third day, but refused the second tim[/QUOTE]
Well, I was allowed to breed afew mares to him, and I wanted to breed one of my (maiden) Teke mares. So we tried hand-breeding and the mare just totally freaked out and literally tore away, dragging me afew yards before I let go. That ticked me off so much I just pulled off her halter & lead rope and turned her loose w/ the stallion in a 3-5 acre field for a week.
I was home alot then, and NEVER, EVER saw them within 20 ft of each other. Each day the mare would be in one corner looking like a frightened virgin and the stallion would be in the other corner, huffing & puffing like he was going to have a heart attack.
As to the second question of on five acres how did I know when one was being bred - for whatever reason the stallion chose to do his breeding by the run in shed before dinner. I know she was covered at least four times, as I witnessed it. Five acres though gave them more than enough room to get away from each other if there posed a problem. The pasture could also be split and I could close them off from each other if things got out of hand through a gate.
With these fairly rigorous demands in mind, I began my search for the perfect breed. Combing the Internet, books, and various sheep shows, I narrowed my choice to a number of breeds and looked at Tunis, Welsh Mountain, Icelandic, and Coopworths, before settling on Clun Forests.
I have a low cost, low labor management style on my farm that can be successfully followed by anyone raising Cluns. My sheep are kept on pasture all year round. From April to November they are rotated between small grazing paddocks every week so that they are never on the same patch of grass more than once a month. Once they have completed an entire rotation they are wormed (usually once a month). They have free access to water and a salt and mineral mix at all times. The pastures consist of orchard grass, perennial rye grass, and white clover mixed with native forbs and grasses (i.e., weeds). The sheep are checked daily, but receive no additional food or attention.
Lambs are ear tagged and tail docked with a band elastrator band on their second day. Triplets are kept with their mothers for the first two days to ensure that all receive a good supply of colostrum. The smallest triplet is then removed for bottle feeding so that all can keep up with the twin lambs. Ewes and lambs are released from the jugs into a separate paddock away from those still waiting to lamb.
The production of meat and wool through sheep farming is essential to the South African livestock industry. Therefore, pasture management is crucial in sheep production. Pasture management is the process of maintaining and keeping pastures in good condition. Small-scale livestock farmers experience significant losses because of decreased productivity caused by decline in pasture production brought on by climate change. Because pastures are reliant on weather, climate change has a significant impact on pasture management thus farmers struggle to keep their sheep alive. Technology in livestock farming introduced the idea of "smart farming," which has simplified and reduced the costs in pasture management. Connectivity, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics are just a few of the cutting-edge technology techniques that smart farming incorporates. However, the challenge is to use this technology effectively to minimize the environmental impact, ecological systems and the atmosphere. Thus, digital twin technology is proposed in this study to alleviate the challenge of changing weather patterns that affect pasture management. Digital twin development includes smart farming technologies, and research demonstrates digital twins can identify and foresee problems before they arise. Hence, due to changing weather patterns, a digital twin model is developed to predict pasture height to ascertain the predicted amount of pasture and ensure that the sheep have access to enough food for sustainable production. Pasture growth is influenced by temperature, rainfall and soil moisture; thus, pasture height predictions depend on these factors. Thus, in this study, digital twin is made of predictive models built on historical and real-time data collected from the IoT sensors and stored in ThingSpeak cloud. Regression and neural network machine learning algorithms were investigated to perform the predictions. Digital shadow development was the preliminary stage in developing a digital twin. Data analysis was performed in MATLAB using the selected algorithm and predictions of the system are modelled in SIMULINK platform. Digital twin can serve to enhance pasture management through its capabilities to monitor pasture in real-time and perform pasture height projections for the future that assist in decision making.
One of the most productive measures of a ewe is her ability to have twins instead of just having one lamb. A sheep that twins is more likely to make you a profit. A sheep that has consistently just one lamb may cause you to lose money.
Let me discuss my situation here at home. My adult White Dorper sheep have a lambing percentage on average of about 180 percent. That means on average I have 1.8 lambs per ewe. In some years I do a little better and get close to 190 percent. Slightly less than ideal conditions during breeding season will lead to a slightly lower average but will stay at or above 170 percent. I also expose the ewe lambs the year they were born to a ram. Most of these lambs breed at the age of 7 to 9 months of age. However, their lambing percentage stays below 150 percent and is not included in my calculation of lambing percentage.
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