Gaining an accurate picture of lamb performance

One of the simplest and most efficient ways to ensure lambs are hitting target weights is regular weighing and monitoring throughout the season. Weighing your livestock helps to ensure your animals are consistently gaining weight so you continue to profit.

Traditionally farmers have relied on their years of experience to know when animals are gaining weight and are ready to be sold or slaughtered. Weighing backs up that experience with facts. It’s all about input verses output – the input cost of feed, staff wages, time, health treatments, pasture and equipment maintenance per day, versus the weight your animals are putting on. In order to profit, your input costs need to be lower than your output gains. RFID sheep tags along with weighing and EID technology will identify your best and worst performers, giving you the opportunity to take advantage of the animals doing well and improve those poor performers before trading. If you’re trading lambs, regular weighing and using the information available will lift your average price, so you’ll spend less time finishing. Further to that, you can track where the top performers have come from using RFID sheep tags. If you use specialist forage crops for finishing your lambs, you can measure your return on that investment and use the information to make decisions about your cropping programme for the future. Z Tags Tagfaster sheep RFID tags along with Tru-Test have the hardware and software solutions that make life easy for you when it comes to weighing and EID, adding value to your bottom line and ensuring you meet your compliance obligations too. Tracking growth using a Tru-Test weighing platform, weigh scales and EID stick

| Drafting lambs with the Tru-Test XR5000 weigh scale and Prattley AutoDrafter. reader used in conjunction with a free software package like Datamars Livestock Cloud, or a subscription software package like Minda or FarmIQ helps farmers improve productivity and animal management within their farming operation. Regular weighing allows you to manage animals individually, identify top performers or those that may need extra attention to bring them up to weight and make the decision to sell animals at the optimum time, to achieve the best price. Using a Z Tag and Tru-Test solution also gives total herd traceability and Datamars Livestock’s cloud software helps record, track weight growth and manage herd genetics. Datamars Livestock is a cloud-based online software system that provides a tool to manage the data you collect, free when you purchase a Tru-Test 5000 series indicator. Datamars Livestock turns weigh session data into an easy-to-understand, graphical snapshot of where your animals are at and helps identify trends. Datamars Livestock is the simple way to monitor animal weight gains and track performance to target weights. You can therefore gather accurate information using your Tru-Test EID reader and weigh scales, analyse it using Datamars Livestock Cloud software and then make timely decisions on-farm.

For further information, contact your Farmlands Technical Field Officer or the friendly team at your local Farmlands store.

Article supplied by Datamars Livestock