Twins Of The Pasture Crack And Patch
Canumil Flowers
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.
At the same time, too much time, oversight and interference can cause problems too, especially with ewe lambs and twins. I left some twins on the ewe lambs the first year and removed some also. I think in the future all ewe lamb twins will stay with their mother unless they get left behind. I also ran into some trouble with triplets(3 sets) this year on the mature ewes, mainly due to my interference. I think those will be treated the same or maybe pull one off after a few days and a good start.
We do end up with a few bottle lambs that were triplets, abandoned, etc. We try to sell them about a week old for $50 and figure that is better than a dead one. But if you have kids, they do make a cute chore responsibility.
We lambed in March the first year because that is when they were bred to start. I would not do that again. We have cold/damp springs here in Northeast Oklahoma and that is rough on the newborn lambs. They do not seem to have enough vigor to overcome the extra cool and rainy nights. I lost a few that we could not bring back because of that.
Since they were not going to be bred until November, we did not manually wean the lambs. We let the ewe lambs do it themselves and I was incredibly pleased with the results. Around the middle of October, I noticed they had been weaned. This worked well because we ended up selling 65-75 pound lambs around Christmas time. We just sold them at a nearby sale barn that specializes in sheep and goats.
As I said previously, the first year was ugly. We had a lot of discussion about whether we needed to let them go. But, we had heard too many successful stories to give up so we decided to continue with the flock and up to now, I am happy we did.
Good Livestock Guardian Dogs are critical to an open pasture system like ours. We have 3 dogs with the flock but I think 2 could do the job. This may sound contradictory, but we are discussing a 4th to train up because if something happens to the ones we have, we have nothing to replace them with.
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.
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