On Farm Validation of ASKBILL – A Sheep Wellbeing and Productivity Application for Australian Industry
Fitzgerald, P. T., Kahn, L. P., Shahinfar, S., Paul, D., Goodacre, M. Kemmis, L. S. “On Farm Validation of ASKBILL – A Sheep Wellbeing and Productivity Application for Australian Industry”, Animal Production 2018: Fostering Innovation through the Value Chain, Wagga Wagga, Australia, July 2018.
Introduction
The most economically important endemic diseases impacting Australian sheep wellbeing and productivity include perinatal mortalities, internal parasites, dystocia, weaner ill-thrift and mortality, and flystrike. Collectively, these diseases cost the Australian sheep industry more than A$1.5 billion per annum (Lane et al. 2015). ASKBILL is a web-based application developed to assist sheep producers to better manage these diseases and thereby improve flock wellbeing and productivity. The ASKBILL application encompasses numerous biophysical models that predict pasture growth, animal performance and risk from flystrike, worm infection and weather stress (Kahn et al. 2017). An important component in the on-going development of ASKBILL is on farm validation designed to allow comparison of measured and predicted values for a range of variables.
david