Animal welfare research, development & extension through industry collaboration & digital innovation

Federation University (Vic Hub Digital Platform Partner)
Farming-Systems Resilience

The research collaboration between Future Regions Research Centre (FRRC), Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) and industry partners is being progressed through several interlinked sub-projects and stages. The initial focus includes generating and publishing the insights gained by combining existing on-farm data on worm resistance with climate, rainfall, soil moisture and other data. The focus will then expand to accessing parasite data through industry collaboration.

PhD student Rebecca Farnell analysing sheep-manure samples to gather data about worm distributions in Victoria.

FRRC and CeRDI are research centres within Vic Hub Digital Platform Partner, Federation University

This project involves the development of an animal-welfare portal that includes parasitic worm data and public datasets to provide livestock producers with better access to information about diseases and other welfare threats in their area. The project is progressing well.

We have recruited a PhD student to the project, Rebecca Farnell (pictured), who is from Ballarat and grew up on an organic sheep farm. Rebecca will collect and analyse sheep-manure samples from farms and sale yards to gather data about worm distributions in Victoria. We are negotiating access to additional parasite datasets in addition to a large dataset of sheep parasite tests that we are already analysing. We are currently focusing on the creation of a parasitic worm database to allow worm species distribution maps to be developed, and eventually be integrated into the animal welfare portal.

The project has received some funding, including an internal ECR seed funding grant from Vic Hub Digital Platform Partner Federation University for Dr Christiane Bahlo, CeRDI Research Associate, to conduct a systematic review of public sheep datasets and include these in the livestock welfare portal. We have also applied for a grant through the Sheep and Cattle Compensation Fund towards further development of the parasitic worm database and animal welfare portal as well as outreach activities with the help of Vic Hub South-West Node, Southern Farming Systems.