O62 Matching grazing behaviour to landscape – a foraging syndrome framework for livestock

Abstract

Pastoral farmers worldwide are facing increasing scrutiny and pressure from consumers, governments, and the public to reduce their environmental footprint. Developing tools and systems that farmers can utilise to maintain profitability and productivity while decreasing their negative externalities is important for the vitality of rural sectors. Variation in the nutritional ecology of the individual has been promoted as an opportunity to improve animal productivity and welfare while decreasing the environmental impacts of livestock farming. Of particular interest are behaviours that are associated with grazing as these are the primary drivers of variation in animal performance in a pastoral livestock system. Developing a methodology that can identify favourable and unfavourable consistent foraging behavioural variations is a critical step in making this a practical solution for farmers. As with all behavioural research the fundamental challenge is selecting the appropriate behaviours to measure. Understanding the contextual drivers of behavioural expression is a major step in this process. We know that farming, social, landscape and many more contexts alters the expression of behaviours so how do we capture behaviours of interest? We propose the use of systemic methodology to capture behaviours of significance from large groups of grazing ruminants using wearable technology, namely GPS and accelerometers. This contrasts with traditional reductionist methodologies used in behaviour research but has the added benefit of providing large objective datasets from undisturbed animals. Statistical analysis of the data will inform behaviours of interest such as daily activity, vegetation use, social networks and topography use. Behaviour sets are clustered together to inform a foraging syndrome using three factors (activity, exploration, and boldness) adapted from the five-factor model (activity, aggression, boldness, exploration, and sociability) of animal personality. Syndromes, unlike personalities include correlated suites of behaviours that are expressed across spatial and temporal contexts. By capturing foraging syndromes, selection can be used to match appropriate syndromes to different farming landscapes, thereby improving productivity while reducing the environmental impact of the farming system