10074184Lamb MonitorActiveCollaborative R&DISCFOne of the most essential tasks involved in the production of lamb is the weighing of growing lambs in order to monitor their liveweight gain and suitability for sale. However, this is a time-consuming process and can be stressful to the lambs being gathered and weighed (Dwyer and Gauci, 2004) leading to considerable weighing intervals, limiting the use of weighing to a means of drafting lambs for sale as opposed to gathering extensive datasets to build in-depth pictures of individual and flock growth rates. Such data would allow lamb producers to monitor growth rates, enabling advanced and accurate prediction of lamb sales as well as providing information with which to alter feeding, grazing and breeding management. In order to turn lamb weighing into a less stressful and time-intensive activity, this project will design, prototype and validate on-farm an automated, in-field lamb weighing solution. Three different designs will be evaluated, with a walk-over weigher, creep-feed attractant and platform (designed to utilise a lamb's play instinct) designs, with a data-handling app being developed alongside which will work with all designs. The project will also develop a creep feed meter to monitor whole-flock and individual animal feed intake, in order to provide DMI data to relate to lamb DLWG in creep-feeding settings. Using one of Ritchie's trial farms and three of AEC's satellite farms, Ritchie will construct initial prototypes for each design of weigher and commission them on-farm for validation. Farmers will continue to weigh their lambs as they currently do, with data gathered from this and the auto-weighers being compared to gain insights into the reliability and value of the data gathered from the auto-weigher versus conventional weighing practice by AEC's data and automation team. Lamb weight data will also be carried through to Ritchie's existing auto-drafting equipment to allow for lamb with sufficient weight data to be drafted automatically, reducing lamb stress and operator time at drafting. Lifecycle assessment will be used to examine the differences in carbon intensity between lamb systems with and without auto-weigher solutions to quantify the difference high-resolutions DLWG monitoring may bring. Given the time between weighing intervals and The project will be managed by AEC's PRINCE2-qualified project management team and dissemination will be carried out by AEC's marketing and communications department via their existing multimedia dissemination channels and in conjunction with the National Sheep Association utilising their dissemination channels to broaden the dissemination audience.