Page 103 - 2020 NZ Hereford Magazine

With this in mind, Cristian Moreno the differences in grazing personalities livestock performance and ecosystem
García has been tracking the grazing might affect animal performance. A deep services, while reducing environmental
patterns and distribution of Hereford and more comprehensive analysis of impact.
cows in four South Island stations as grazing behaviour data gathered from
part of a three-year PhD programme at Hereford herds at Bluestone Herefords
Lincoln University. Cristian’s target is to Stud, Mendip Hills Station and Orari
monitor the behaviour of 500 cows, using Gorge Station, along with data from THIS PAGE, BELOW:
90 GPS devices. He started in 2018 with Lees Valley Station, might confirm on a A 3D view plotting the grazing paths of two
cows at Lees Valley Station; the orange
a preliminary study conducted at Lees larger scale the consistency of grazing one used low-middle country while the blue
Valley Station, where he tracked 20 cows. personalities and their implications for grazed at much higher altitude.
During his work in 2019, Cristian’s
data collection yielded nearly five
million GPS data points from 100
cows. Preliminary analysis of the data
collected in 2018 and 2019 shows not
only differences in grazing behaviours
among cows, but also divergent grazing
personalities consistently over years.
This data indicated that there are cows
that naturally prefer to graze at higher
altitudes, while using average steep
slopes at ~300 metres higher than
other cows. Those cows seemed to
compensate for the extra effort of grazing
higher country by reducing their daily
walking distance by 20% compared with
their counterparts that grazed the lower
sites. Our lab is trying to understand how

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