Animal Bytes

A scanning technique used to assess sheep carcasses could be used to accurately quantify the weights of fat, muscle and bone of primal beef joints.

Continental bred bulls can be slaughtered at weights up to 800kg live weight without detrimental affects on meat colour or quality.

Tall fescue grasses supported lower milk yield and milk protein production than either perennial ryegrasses or timothy grasses, according to a trial recently completed by research scientists at Aberystwyth’s Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research.

It is possible to dry off and finish feed cull cows at pasture regardless of over-wintering strategy.

Reduced labour and more content calves were just two of the benefits recorded for calves reared using a computerised system in a recent trial.

Scarce labour resources may most usefully be targeted towards male calves, post calving. That was the conclusion of a study, recently completed at the SAC.

There is significant potential to improve the carcass quality of lamb sourced from the hill sheep sector by crossing a proportion of Blackface ewes with upland or terminal sires to produce crossbred replacement females.

Make movie stars of your lambs and improve your ‘intramuscular fat’ estimations. It seems that video imaging analysis (VIA) can accurately predict weight and composition of finished shorn lambs, in a non-disruptive manner, and substantially improves the estimation of intramuscular fat.

Protein supplementation can improve the body weight of both ewes and lambs facing worm infection pressures and it can also reduce ewe faecal egg counts (FEC) during lactation.

Tannins could be used to treat of intestinal parasites in sheep in the future, particularly since the prevalence of resistance to conventional anthelmintics in increasing.