Animal Sciences

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Agricultural Services

This major group includes establishments primarily engaged in performing soil preparation services, crop services, veterinary services, other animal services, farm labor and management services, and landscape and horticultural services, for others on a contract or fee basis. However, feedlots and poultry hatcheries operated on a contract or fee basis are included in Major Group 02.

Soil Preparation Services

Soil Preparation Services

Crop Services

Veterinary Services

Animal Services, Except Veterinary

Farm Labor And Management Services

Landscape And Horticultural Services

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

African wild dogs considered for a name change to up image - The Washington Post

This endangered species with big, round ears and a patchy white, yellow and black pelt is in such jeopardy that there is talk among conservationists of renaming the species “painted dog” or “painted wolf” to dignify its image and ensure people don’t confuse the name with a scrawny stray. That way, the thinking goes, the species will become more than a footnote to other imperiled animals such as the lion and rhino that are viewed as having more gravitas.

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Cattle farming: A trajectory of decline

Generally, the cattle industry, and in particular the BMC, is in decline. Cattle farmers in Botswana currently get poor deals as they only have access to two markets, BMC and local butcheries.Farmers are not able to directly access more profitable export markets such as South Africa, where both cattle and beef fetch higher prices.In 2003/4 agriculture contributed 2.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 70-80 percent of which was attributed to cattle production.

Statistics Botswana figures show that the cattle population has fluctuated between 2.5 million and 3 million.However, the commonly accepted estimate is 2.5 million cattle. Cattle holdings grew from 66,410 in 2007 to 75,937 in 2008 at national level. Evidence gathered by the annual Agricultural Survey Report suggests that cattle population increased significantly by 24.1 percent from 1.778 million to 2.220 million in 2008.

In the years reviewed, the traditional sector dominated cattle population. The trend shows figures ranging between 2.0 million and 2.5 million, except in 2002 when the population rose to 3 million and in 2007 when it declined to about 1.8 million.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Developing a new non-invasive test for welfare status

“Finding non-invasive tests for health, production and welfare of farm animals has been a top priority for research and the advent of genomics and molecular biology technology will help advance this important research area”, says Mingan Choct, CEO of Poultry CRC. Indeed, Anthony and Tamsyn are going to work with a number of established animal welfare researchers, combining traditional approaches and frontier science to search for additional objective measures of poultry welfare. Their idea is to use miRNA profiling as a definitive measure of a bird’s welfare status based on leads in other research findings. As Tamsyn notes, “recent studies investigating diseases in humans and other animals have shown clear differences in the expression patterns of miRNAs in the blood from healthy animals compared to those suffering disease.” Anthony added, “since miRNAs are found in human and cow milk, it’s reasonable to expect to find them in eggs. Therefore Tamsyn and I should be able to develop a technique to assess welfare status using eggs, and possibly excreta, non-invasively.”