Husbandry

Overview

MLA’s animal husbandry research and development (R&D) investments aim to enhance animal welfare through best practice, increase levels of productivity and profitability and enhance public support of the red meat industry.

This area of investment focuses on enabling practice change by producers when caring for, raising and breeding livestock by removing or replacing aversive husbandry methods.

Improved husbandry practices increase individual animal and herd performance, reduce livestock mortality and strengthen the red meat industry’s social licence to operate.

Core activities

Primary R&D projects in animal husbandry focus on:

• facilitating the integration of parasite and pest management with the husbandry calendar to improve efficiency and animal welfare
• replacing painful and aversive husbandry practices, such as de-horning by providing genetic tests to breed out horns from beef production systems, and breeding plain-bodied sheep that don’t need to be mulesed
• ameliorating unavoidable aversive practices with pain relief products
• ensuring the accuracy and availability of existing guides to animal husbandry practices
• capturing meat processor data on health conditions and feeding these back to farms as an indicator of success in animal husbandry practices
• linking carcase quality information at slaughter with life-time animal management, health and production data
• improving producer understanding of behavioural control methods
• identifying more efficient and humane methods of euthanasing livestock in the field.

Benefits to industry

• Producer adoption of non-aversive husbandry techniques improves animal welfare and positively responds to community expectations about the way livestock are treated.
• Improved husbandry practices increase animal welfare, individual animal and herd performance and reduces livestock morbidity and mortality.