Ten Reasons to Weigh Your Livestock
August 30, 2024
Weighing livestock is a fundamental part of managing and monitoring your animals, whether you have 5 or 500. Accurately weighing your animals not only helps you monitor health and performance, but it also provides you with a powerful tool for making decisions. Here are the top 10 reasons how accurately tracking animal weights can benefit your farm business.
1. Sell at the Right Time
Monitoring your livestock's weight helps you time sales to match market conditions and help you secure the best price. By tracking weight changes, you can estimate when your animals will reach the ideal weight for sale, maximising your profits.
2. Optimising feed supply and demand
Weighing your stock helps you align feed supply with your livestock’s demands throughout the year. With live weight information, you can make informed decisions about whether to invest in feed, determine what will give you the best return, and assess the effectiveness of different feeding regimes.
3. Improve Young Stock Development
Weighing your young stock regularly is a great way to make sure they're hitting important growth milestones. By keeping an eye on their progress, you can tweak their diet to get the best out of their feed and support their healthy growth. This small step now can make a big difference to their future productivity and your bottom line.
4. Detect Problems Early
If you’re weight data indicates some animals are losing weight, it might be a sign they're unwell. Keeping track of their weight helps you catch these issues early, so you can give them the right treatment and avoid wasting medication or missing the real problem.
In New Zealand, more than a third of sheep farms are experiencing worsening drench resistance, with many now relying on triple-active drenches due to ineffective single treatments. By regularly weighing your animals, farmers can identify poor weight gains that might indicate resistance issues. Early detection through weight monitoring allows you to adjust your treatment strategies or explore alternative solutions before the problem escalates. Being proactive helps maintain livestock health and prevent costly and more severe issues down the line.
5. Make Better Breeding Choices
Using weight data to inform strategic breeding decisions allows you to identify animals with the best growth potential and desirable breeding traits. This allows you to select animals that will enhance your herd's overall productivity and performance, improving the genetic quality of the herd.
6. Choosing finishing stock
Reviewing weights of mobs from different sources allows you to evaluate which animals have better growth rates and feed efficiency. This helps you choose stock that meet your productivity goals and improve your farm's economic outcomes.
7. Staff training and development
Weighing regularly can also be a valuable tool for training and development, by helping new farm staff or less experienced managers understand how to monitor animal health and growth effectively. By learning to interpret weight data, your staff can gain practical skills in managing feed, assessing animal development, and making informed decisions.
8. Support Succession Planning
Detailed weight records are valuable for transitioning farm management to the next generation. They provide new managers with insights into past performance and current conditions, helping maintain effective practices and ensuring a smooth handover.
If you’re preparing to pass on the farm to the next generation or bring in new management, having detailed weight records helps ensure continuity in animal management practices. This data provides new managers with a clear understanding of past performance trends and current livestock conditions. By integrating regular weighing into your succession plan, you help maintain effective management practices and support a smooth transition of responsibilities.
9. Enhance collaboration with vets and contractors
Sharing weight data with vets and contractors improves their ability to diagnose health issues and tailor treatment plans, and ensure all parties are working towards the same goals. For contractors like heifer graziers, weight records help set and evaluate growth targets with their farmer clients, leading to more effective partnerships.
10. Boost Efficiency with Record-Keeping
Keeping accurate weight records not only improves your feed planning and health management but also saves you time. With detailed data at your fingertips, you can quickly spot trends, make informed decisions, and address issues more effectively, making your farm operations smoother and more productive. Plus, collecting and analysing this data is easier than ever.
