Stockman helps feed efficiency stay top of the data-driven agenda at Meikle Maldron

Duncan and Claire Morrison farm 650 acres (263ha) across three units in the North East of Scotland and are Monitor Farm hosts for Deeside under the 2022-2026 project. Meikle Maldron is home to 240 cows across the Morrison’s three units comprising of pedigree Aberdeen Angus and Stabliser herds.

Duncan, Claire and their team have recently been assessing their business goals and farm practices with an eye on a more profitable and efficient future which included finishing young bulls on a forage-based diet. That’s when they learned of an opportunity to be part of an innovation project with Herd Advance.

The Herd Advance project funded by Scottish Enterprise enabled the company to beta test their Stockman solution on varying farm types supporting the technology readiness of the system.

As the team at Meikle Maldron were looking for chances to improve their efficiencies and introduce more tech based solutions to their practices Duncan saw joining this project as a great opportunity to try something new.

 “The project gave us the perfect opportunity to try out the Herd Advance Stockman system, at the time we were adapting the diet of our finishing bulls,” said Duncan “The system allowed us to see real-time data on how animals performed on, and responded to, the changing diet, which helped us to make informed decisions. Each bull was weighed up to eleven times a day and, with the information literally at our fingertips, it meant we could tweak quantity of feed and react much more quickly to any issues that became apparent."

Stockman enabled Duncan and Claire to determine how well bulls were performing on their new diet using real time data, saving the team days of work and ensuing the health and wellbeing of the herd.

Duncan and his team commented that the system was very easy to place into the existing infrastructure and needed minimal installation preparation, it was a simple process of attaching the water supply into the system. The cattle quickly learned the new process of getting a drink and being able to access the water individually meant that bullying stopped. The team at Meikle Maldron feel that Stockman has transformed operations on site as the herd no longer associate the team with stress or handling.

“Bulls can be notoriously lively, but the Stockman meant they became very easy to work with. Their behaviour completely changed because they didn’t associate us with stress of being handled”.

 “There’s less stress and more time saved from not handling or weighing the bulls now. There’s a saying that every time you handle cattle to weigh them, they lose days of weight gain – with Stockman there are efficiency benefits from that, and from a health and safety point of view, being able to draft cattle without chasing them around is safer for us and them.”

Duncan believes that a system like the Stockman aligns perfectly with where the industry is headed and that the future possibilities for additions to the system and the operations it could be used on are wide-ranging and game changing.

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