When thinking about topics for her PhD, agricultural scientist Korrie Fletcher saw a research gap in the relationship between eating behaviour, feed intake efficiency and methane production.
When thinking about topics for her PhD, agricultural scientist Korrie Fletcher saw a research gap in the relationship between eating behaviour, feed intake efficiency and methane production.
As she says, methane is a hot topic and an area of focus for this country’s livestock sector, particularly given its emissions profile, and feed efficiency is of real interest to farmers
While work has and is being done looking at genetically-driven variations in methane production in sheep and beef and their links to feed intake, there has been very little research carried out on any potential links between eating behaviour and methane production, and this is where Korrie is focusing her efforts.
With the help of a scholarship from AgEC (Agricultural Emissions Centre), Korrie will be spending the next three years based in Dunedin, analysing datasets and looking for genetic links between the eating behaviours of individual sheep and cattle and methane production.
Korrie, who spends four days a week at Beef + Lamb New Zealand’s office and one day at the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s Invermay Research Unit, grew up on a dairy farm near Wanganui.
She has always been interested in farming, and wanting to forge a career in the sector, she combined her interest in science and agriculture and studied Agricultural Science.
“I loved agricultural science and all the plant, soil and animal sciences it covers. It gives you a broad view of the industry, but I particularly enjoyed genetics and animal science.”
During her degree at Lincoln University, Korrie completed an Honours project with the Bioeconomy Science Institute which used Ramguard data to evaluate the genetic heritability of facial eczema tolerance.
She spent a summer working at DairyNZ on a project that used wearable technology to monitor cow wellbeing. This introduced Korrie to technologies that had the potential to generate valuable data about animal behaviour.
Korrie started her PhD in April by carrying out a literature review, this reinforced how little research had been done on eating behaviour and the link to methane production. More recently, she has taken delivery of datasets from Invermay’s Feed Intake facility and will, in the future, be analysing datasets from Te Mania’s Vytelle feed efficiency unit. She is also hoping to access data captured on wearables placed on cattle and sheep grazing pasture.
It is very early days yet, but Korrie is excited about the topic and has her supervisors Jason Archer, B+LNZ’s Dunedin-based Head of Genetics, B+LNZ Geneticist Franzi Weik, Tricia Johnson, Science Team Leader and Senior Scientist Animal Genomics at the Bioeconomy Science Institute, and Nick Sneddon, Senior Lecturer in Animal Genetics and Breeding at Massey University, on- hand to support her work.
In May, Korrie was one of 20 scholars selected by B+LNZ to attend the Sheep Breeders Forum and Out the Gate conference in Christchurch.
She says it was a great opportunity to connect with sheep breeders and farmers and get their perspective on issues affecting the industry as well as meet other students.
“I was quite surprised at how enthusiastic everyone was to have young people there- it was quite encouraging.”
After completing her PhD- which Korrie is aiming to have done within three-years– she would like to work overseas- before returning home.
While keeping an open mind to future possibilities, she would like to pursue a career in genetics and livestock sciences.