Going Ahead with Goats project

My name is Doctor Gordon Refshauge. I'm a senior research scientist with the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development.

We're here at the Condobolin Agricultural Research and Advisory Station here today, looking at condition scoring of dos at the time of marking.

The fundamental reason why condition scoring is important is because there's a sweet spot in condition score and it's a prediction of a future outcome. So an animal that's too lean is less likely to rear as many kids as an animal that's in ideal condition. And those females that are too fat are more likely to rear fewer kids as well.

So management of animals on condition score helps you make decisions about the allocation of pasture base. When it's limiting, that's really helpful. When it's abundant, you make different decisions again as well. So it's a guide to help you make simple decisions.

It's done once or twice a year. It's not hard to do, and it will just improve the overall efficiency of the farm. So you just have less wastage.

Condition scoring is the assessment of fat and muscle tissue that occupies the space around short loin of the animal. The short loin is the space between the long ribs of the chest and the hips. The structure of the bones are a bit like this.

So with the dorsal and lateral bones, and the spacing between these bones is the muscle and some fat tissue. We're assessing for how sharp those bones feel, but also for how much muscle and fat tissue occupies that space.

It's relative on a 1 to 5 scale, where one is lean and emaciated and five is an obese animal. We palpate this site with our hands and make an assessment for where the animal sits. It is a forward forecast for expected outcomes. An animal in particular that is lean is less likely to be pregnant and more likely to have a single if it is pregnant. When the number of kids is a driver of profit, an animal that is one score, if it has the opportunity to be placed on a higher plane of nutrition before joining, is more likely to have a higher pregnancy rate and twinning rate.  And if that animal at pregnancy scanning is placed on a higher plane in nutrition, she's more likely to have a heavier kid, rear more of those kids and have a heavier weight kid at weaning. And those are key profit drivers.

The best time to assess condition score is at weaning, because that gives you the time before joining to place these females onto a higher plane of nutrition. If those animals are weaned from their female, from their kids, they can be placed in different paddocks.

That will then reflect the nutritional requirements. And the next best time to assess condition score is a pregnancy scanning, where you can assess the nutritional requirements of these animals and make an adjustment for their litter size, where twins will need better feed than do the singles.

We feel for the amount of fat and muscle tissue that occupies the space between the dorsal bones and the lateral bones on the side. We also feel with our fingers how sharp those bones may feel and whether there's differences between them, as if my fingers were close together or further apart.

This doe here is close to a three so she's in better condition than this one, which you can probably detect. Maybe just by seeing that spine pop up a little more pronounced.

Move forward girl, up you come.

This doe here I would call above 3. I'll give her a three and a quarter. So I can still feel the bones, but there's a lot more meat in there and there's less divisions in between these lateral and dorsal bones.

This doe here is a two and a half score in my mind. You can't really see that she's poor from a distance, but she would perform better if she was on a rising plane of nutrition.

This doe, she looks a little rougher, but it's actually in better condition. And she's close to a three. So there's more muscle tissue in here which will carry her further forward in a lactation and increase her ovulation rate slightly. I would be trying to condition score between 15 and 20 per cent of the mob is my safe number.

Why don't we just weight these animals instead of condition scoring them? The reason for that is because at any one live weight, there is a wide range in condition scores. While equally there's a huge range in weight at the same condition score,
live weight doesn't tell you what the nutritional requirements for this animal is.

So we can group animals into need types on condition score much more easily
than we can with live weight.
 

My name's Doctor Gordon Refshauge. I'm a senior research scientist with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development.

I want farmers to put their hands on udders and start culling out the ones that are not suitable for future breeding. Assess the animals that are kidded in lost, that are dry and have are structural unsoundness. Structural unsound udders should not be remated to bucks.

So the value of assessing udders isn't just taking out animals that are no good for breeding, but also that improving the genetics of the herd over time, and improving the efficiency of the farm in terms of number of animals run and number of kids weaned.

It's the udder that is what the kid is going to survive on in the first 4 to 6 weeks of its life, particularly in the first three days after birth. Udder structure is vital to the ability of kids to drink milk, and those kids that don't drink milk aren't going to survive.

So a key profit driver for goat production systems is number of kids weaned. Any factor that inhibits the number of kids that are weaned, such as low pregnancy rates, low twinning rates and low kids survival is going to be a hindrance.

The best time to inspect udders is at marking. And that's because any time the does are in the yard, there's an opportunity to find those that have poor structure in the udder and the teat. But at marking is when the evidence is most clear, because the does are most likely going to be lactating, and it's when you've got them in the yards that's the chance to identify these animals.

The process of inspecting udders is to have them in a race, ideally, and put your hands on udders and feel whether you have an unsound structure there, whether the doe is dry or kidded and lost, which feels different to an udder that is rearing kids, which will be full of milk, turgid when you press in against it.

You can feel for udder abnormalities and teat abnormalities. So I would run them into a race. If you couldn't do that, then inspecting them individually as they move through a gate and finding a way to identify that animal, is critical.

So in this race I am wetting and drying these does, looking for the udder status. Whether they are rearing a kid or not rearing a kid. All these does were scanned in kid. So I have potentially three types of udder, which is wet, kidded and lost, or dry.

Because we have RFID tags in these animals. I can record all that information against the animal using the wand, which makes the assessment fast and simple, and allows me to later on review the data, while also having the chance to find out which ones I want to keep or cull at this time or another time in the future.

So I'm looking for how much milk might be in the udder and whether there is any structural issues here with these does. So I wand the animal. She is a wet.

It's not terribly hard to do. I just need to put my hand on the udder and feel those teats to see if there's any structural faults.

So if you're ever not sure about whether an animal is rearing a kid or not, it makes a lot of sense to strip the milk out.

The milk should look white, like you bought it at the store. And that's the animal that's rearing. If it is watery or grey or some other colour, then it's not rearing, you can confidently cull it out.

But check both teats.

Looking for anomalies, which is anything lumpy or mastitis in the udder, where there is none. So she's normal.

We're looking for extra teats and seeing if they are functional. There’s one functional on the left, additional, and on the right the additional teat is blind.

Dry udders are suggestive of an abortive agency. So this doe is dry. She lost her foetuses before giving birth, and it suggests that we've got perhaps an organism that is causing these foetuses to be lost. This is why I look for dry udders when I'm wetting and drying does not just kidded and lost.

I want to know dry, versus kidded and lost, versus wet. So if the percentage of animals that are dry is more than 5%, then I would suspect an abortive disease organism active in the herd or the flock.

So this doe has structural problems. These teats are five score, they’re very large. A kid is not going to suckle on that as a neonate, a newborn. There's poor attachment. So the udder is hanging down to the ground. It's not held up against the animal. So she's been culled. There's some separation here. There's a lot going wrong with that particular udder. She's not going to rear kids again. We’ll remove her from the program.

When you identify a doe with an unsound udder, I would strongly recommend identifying that animal, whether that is an ear tag that denotes udder failure, reproduction failure for that animal, and allows you in the future to identify that animal again visually. Or an ear notch, some sort of earmark that's unique. Or to use electronic identification, which gives you the opportunity for lifetime assessment of these animals, which is coming in and is the opportunity as we move forward in the next couple of years.