Pastoral Partners Accelerating the Transition
| Project start date: | 28 February 2021 |
| Project end date: | 15 August 2024 |
| Project status: | In progress |
| Livestock species: | Grass-fed Cattle |
| Relevant regions: | Western Australia |
| Site location: | Gascoyne/Murchison WA |
Summary
This Producer Demonstration Site (PDS) is designed to demonstrate and assist producers in northern WA to reduce weight and productivity losses of cattle during transitioning from rangelands to backgrounding by integrating adaptation procedures to enhance livestock performance.
Objectives
By June 2024 this project aims to:
1. Measure and demonstrate the differences in cattle live weight across 5 pastoral/agricultural partnerships through measurement of individual animals and total load weights. The cattle to be used may be a combination of breeders and weaners.
2. Relate existing performance to existing management practices (labour, time taken loading and transport duration, nutritional resources provided (pre and post transition), handling procedures and any other additional resources allocated across the transition chain).
3. Support the implementation of practices that may assist producers to manage cattle in a way that reduces the impact of the transition from rangelands to backgrounding.
4. Measure the impact of changed practice on both individual businesses and benchmarked across the core group and conduct a cost/benefit analysis of changes implemented.
5. Implement whole-of-chain change practice recommendations by instituting a holistic behavioural change program incorporating group learning outcomes with the core group.
6. Monitor and evaluate the project outcomes to provide a positive feedback loop for producers and verify/integrate procedures that aim to achieve the goal of halving any measured losses.
7. Extend adoption by conducting 5 demonstration day workshops across the pastoral and agricultural zones on core participating properties to demonstrate the effects of changed practices and procedures to wider group members and industry.
8. Improve the knowledge and skills of all the participating core producers and 80% of observer producers.
9. 100% of core producers and 45% of observer producers adopt new practices that reduce weight loss of livestock being transitioned from pastoral to agricultural areas.
