David Ritchie (Implements) Limited

One of the most essential tasks involved in the production of lamb is the weighing of growing lambs in order to monitor their liveweight gain and suitability for sale. However, this is a time-consuming process and can be stressful to the lambs being gathered and weighed (Dwyer and Gauci, 2004) leading to considerable weighing intervals, limiting the use o...

The proposed project focusses on developing an **AUTOMATED** data-driven **INNOVATION** for **NON-INVASIVE** and **REAL-TIME** monitoring of respiratory disease in dairy-bred calves. Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is the most serious issue facing beef and dairy farmers, costing the UK sector alone around £80M per annum (Zoetis 2022) through mortality, v...

"There is currently extensive inefficiency in the UK beef sector. Producers routinely assess the performance of their animals by eye and frequently retain them on farm too long, resulting in animals becoming too fat. This leads to increased variable farm costs, reduced annual capacity of beef finishing units and sub-optimal price paid for carcasses -- for...

Tail biting in growing pigs is affected by many risk factors, but an outbreak can start without warning or obvious cause. This unpredictable tail biting results in pain and sickness for bitten pigs and severe economic losses for farmers: infection through tail wounds results in abattoir condemnation of meat. Tail docking of piglets is partly effective at ...

This project aims to develop a non-intrusive system which will allow beef finishing units to identify the optimal time to market finished cattle. The system will combine innovative; animal handling; automated weighing; image capture; and analysis software to provide realtime objective feedback on animal condition, market value and optimal time to take to ...

To establish an internal data bank and knowledge base for implementation in design of industrial gas or offshore equipment based on relevant engineering standards and/or regulations.