Weed eating cattle
Animal behaviour experts believe that by reducing stress levels in livestock, the herd can be encouraged to try new feed types and can even be taught to eat weeds.
Research from the CSIRO has also found a broader, more adventurous diet has benefits for the health and productivity of livestock.
Bruce Maynard, a stress-free stock handling consultant from New South Wales, says the key to getting livestock to experiment with their diet is to make sure they're comfortable with their environment.
According to Mr Maynard, when animals are less stressed they're more likely to try new behaviours, such as eating weeds and other different plants.
What happens in any group of animals is you do have experimenters and you do have very conservative animals, and everything in between.Bruce Maynard, stress free stockmanship consultant
"What happens in any group of animals is you do have experimenters and you do have very conservative animals, and everything in between," he says.
"So you've got a bell curve of behaviours there and what we're going to do is work on emphasising the inventiveness of the mob and by taking anxiety away what we're going to do is shift that whole bell curve just a little bit and you end up with more weed eaters in there."
Animal behaviour expert Fred Provenza, professor emeritus from Utah State University, says experimentation will grow once a small group starts eating something new.
"What we know is that those behaviours can spread through a herd from animals learning from one an other."
He says livestock are constantly learning.
"I think if you can have animals that are encouraged to sample new foods all the time, to eat a variety of foods from very early on, they quickly embrace new foods and variety becomes something that's important to their diet and important then to the way that they select.
"The same is true for where they go in a landscape, if they get trained up to be sedentary and to just live along, for instance, the riverbank, you have one kind of behaviour that's been learned, but they can learn also to move across landscapes and that's important because then you increase the carrying capacity of the landscape and the diversity of foods and habitats that the animals are using.
Professor Provenza says the approach he teaches is more than just getting livestock to eat weeds.
"There's so many layers to it and those layers, from behavioural standpoint, have to do with how animals experience food, the feedback they get from eating food, the importance of variety in their diet to enable them.
"Beyond that then, what the animals are doing in the environment is influencing the soil, influencing the plants and ultimately that influences the quality of meat for human consumption."
The CSIRO has been researching feed choices to try to find out how different grasses and plants affect livestock health and productivity.
Dr Dean Revell, a livestock researcher with the CSIRO, says a diet of a wide range of plants is good for your livestock but admits improvements can be hard to spot in the short-term.
"It can be quite subtle at a moment in time but quite profound in the longer term.
"If you get a young heifer that's just doing a little bit better all along then her chances of coming in to calf are that much better and then the economics really play out because you've got a productive animal instead of an unproductive one."