The Benefits of Weighing your Livestock Regularly

Weighing your livestock regularly feels like a tedious exercise, but it’s very necessary. It’s an important management tool for your livestock, helping you manage data well, so that you are well informed and can make better decisions when it comes to your animals, making sure you improve both their productivity and efficiency.  

Estimating your animal’s weight gain or loss doesn’t benefit you or your livestock in any way, it doesn’t only lead to loss of data, but of profit if the correct measures aren’t taken within a considerable amount of time. Regular livestock weighing helps you detect disease quickly, which if not detected early enough can lead to financial implications in the long run.  

This system is usually seen as not important, especially by small scale farmers, but it’s causing more issues than not when attended early enough. This can be especially essential for calve producers as these fragile beings need more attention by keeping strict records of their weights and diet. As it is commonly said that feed is the most expensive thing to beef farmers, this is especially important to ensure you don’t over feed your cattle. 

Benefits 

1. Monitor Animal Performance: Regularly weighing your livestock allows you to keep track of their weight and health. This information can be used to see if they are meeting their daily targeted weight and indicate areas that need more work. Monitoring your animals will also impact their mating capabilities because if they are not at their optimal rate, this will affect conceptional rates, which implicates production issues and may also affect raising your calves.
2. Improve Animal Health: Knowing their weight will help you administrator the right amount of dose for their treatment. Overdosing and under dosing are both expensive and that is why regular checks and amount of treatment are important. Regular checks help you track their weight, so you know when they will be ready and in time for the sale. This information can help you decide if you should be investing in feed or not and focus on what will give you the best return.
3. Better decision making: Having this kind of data will help you make better decisions, especially for farmers who are market watching so that they can know when to sell.

In conclusion, regular livestock weighing, despite its initial perception as a mundane task, proves indispensable for farmers seeking to optimize animal welfare, productivity, and profitability. Moreover, the data obtained from regular weighing empowers farmers to make better-informed decisions, from determining optimal selling times to refining feed investment strategies, ultimately enhancing overall farm profitability and sustainability. Thus, while it may demand effort and consistency, the benefits of regular livestock weighing far outweigh any perceived inconvenience, making it an essential tool for modern agricultural management.