Animal Performance

How implementing a regular weighing programme helps to maximise the performance of livestock.

You can't manage what you don't measure.

In today’s increasingly competitive agricultural landscape farmers are looking to drive continuous improvement in their farming operation. From wholesale customers demanding specific target weights; to contract graziers required to report progress weights and weight gain; to achieving industry target condition levels for maximum reproductive success; or complying with breed society/traceability and other industry standard reporting systems and much much more; solutions that replace guesswork with accurate, reliable information are becoming increasingly popular.

Weighing systems enable farmers to easily capture animal weights, replacing the traditional ‘eyeometer’ with an accurate measurement. A weighing system plays a critical role in tracking animal performance and driving farm profitability. Specifically, the animal weight data collected allows farmers to make informed decisions about health treatments, feed regimes, breeding and crop performance.

Measuring & Analysing

Critical performance measures captured include:

- Stock growth rates and conditions scores
- Breeding performance (AI dates, pregnancy results, birthing ease/complications etc)
- Growth rates versus Crop and forage feed regimes
- Health treatments (drench dosage levels, dates and intervals)
- Stock inventory information

This raw data can then be cross referenced with the influencing factors making operating decisions clearer and extremely time efficient. e.g.

- Animal growth rates analysis eg: against feed source or by genetic source
- Crop and forage performance and profitability eg: feed to target weight conversion goals
- Animal breeding performance eg: pedigree tree tracking, pregnancy results vs weight & AI, herd or flock culling decisions
- Animal health treatments eg: efficacy of treatment programme, managing withholding periods

Benefits of automation

However one of the main challenges to an ongoing recording, monitoring and analysis strategy is time and efficiency. Traditional paper based systems are notoriously inaccurate and time consuming. Error rates in manual tag reading simply due to mud & poor visibility are inevitable. Then there’s the time involved in re-typing that information to review it at a later stage let alone the time involved in analysing.

With the vast array of automated systems now available the end to end process from initial data capture through to reviewing the information in order to make decisions is far simpler and quicker. Some of the systems available are more complex than others, at Gallagher our focus is on putting brilliant solutions in farmer’s hands that are supremely simple to use. With our pedigree in animal management our products have easy to use menu’s, unique touch screens and a host of ingenious ideas that make these devices straight forward to pick up and go.