Recommendations on visit duration and sample number requirements for an automated head chamber system

Automated head chamber systems (AHCS; GreenFeed, C-Lock Inc., Rapid City, SD) increasingly are being used for measuring the gas flux of unrestrained cattle. There are a wide range of recommendations for what constitutes a "good" visit (i.e., duration) to an AHCS and how many visits are required for the AHCS to quantify gas fluxes accurately and precisely. Accordingly, the purpose of this experiment was to investigate the effects of visit duration thresholds and the subsequent effects of these thresholds on the number of visits needed to provide adequate estimates of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions, and oxygen (O2) consumption by beef cattle. This analysis utilized data from three previously published experiments with grazing beef steers and one experiment with finishing beef steers, with 103 steers total. When comparing all available visits, there was excellent agreement [Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) ≥ 0.96] between visits ≥ 3 min in duration and those ≥ 2 min for the three gases in all four experiments. When data from all four experiments were pooled, there was excellent agreement between visits ≥ 3 min and those ≥ 2 min and ≥ 1 min for all gases (CCC ≥ 0.96). These results suggest that estimates from visits ≥ 2 min are like those from visits ≥ 3 min. Next, we investigated if including visits ≥ 2 min or ≥ 1 min would increase the minimal number of visits required to provide excellent agreement with the "gold-standard" (mean of all visits ≥ 3 min). For this, we used only one of the experiments and randomly selected visits per animal ranging from n = 5 to 60, in increments of 5. The sole experiment was used because all animals had more than 60 visits. We then assessed the agreement between the "gold-standard" (mean of all visits ≥ 3 min [144 ± 55.01 visits per steer]) estimates of CO2, O2, and CH4. The minimum number of visits required to achieve excellent agreement (CCC ≥ 0.90) to the "gold-standard" estimate for all gases was 30 visits ≥ 3 min in duration, or 40 visits ≥ 2 min in duration. Visits ≥ 1 min in duration did not achieve excellent agreement, even when 60 were used. Based on these results, we recommend excluding visits < 3 min in duration with 30 minimum visit records per animal. However, if researchers choose to implement a 2-min visit duration threshold then 40 visit records are needed per animal.