Team: 35
School: Melrose High
Area of Science: Animal Science
Proposal: Farmers and ranchers constantly have problems with finding lost cattle, especially when complications arise during birth. The problem is that livestock producers don’t really know where or in what condition the cows are at any given time. Sometimes they are too late in finding them to help the animal. This can cause loss of animals, and thus loss of profits.
As a continuation of last year’s project, we wanted to make this model show the benefits of having individual trackers on all animals in the herd. These trackers will monitor and report the health of current location of the animals involved. We’ve shown how the tracker would help the farmer or rancher when searching for missing animal, but it didn’t really touch on the health part of the process. That is the goal of this year. We intend to show the benefits of timely assistance to birthing animals.
We are going to make a computer program that models a farmer going to the pasture to find the calving cows and track how long the search takes and how quickly assistance can be given if needed. In this model, we will have a pasture, cows, low spots, brush, a watering hole, and other parts of the terrain. We are going to do this on Netlogo. Also, we will work with local producers to get information to make our model as realistic as possible.
Team Members:
Rilee Priest
Joshua Healer
Joshua Gorley
Sponsoring Teacher: Alan Daugherty