Dairy research in Tasmania has been boosted, with new infrastructure at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture’s Dairy Research Facility, enabling large-scale trials to reduce methane emissions, while maintaining farm productivity and profitability. A new supplementary feed facility has been installed at TIA’s Dairy Research Facility at Elliott on Tasmania’s North-West Coast, jointly funded by the Tasmanian Government, TIA and Fonterra. TIA livestock production centre leader James Holls said this upgrade transformed our feeding system from a standard commercial set-up to one designed specifically for complex research trials. “We now have the capacity to feed four different supplements directly to animals in the dairy during milking,” James said. “This increased flexibility means we can expand our methane mitigation trials where we feed specific amounts of low-emissions feed additives under various feeding rates. “We can now test methane-reducing feed additives over longer periods ...