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How often are you monitoring stock weights? If it’s not every 4–6 weeks, you might be missing valuable insights that could help your animals’ welfare and improve your bottom line.
From early disease detection and prevention to feed efficiency, profitability and long-term farm sustainability, regular weight monitoring provides essential data that supports better farm management decisions. Let’s break it down.
Understanding livestock weight tracking
Not sure if it’s time to sell or just give the animal more time to grow? Weight tracking helps you make that call. It highlights both top performers ready for market and others that might need more support — or a health check.
Precise weight measurements paint a clear picture of what the animal needs. This enables better resource allocation for breeding, treatments, feed use, and ultimately, sales timing.
Regular weight tracking delivers clear key benefits:
- Increased profitability: Sell at peak market weight to get the best return.
- Reduced feed waste: Adjust feed plans based on real growth data to cut costs and improve efficiency.
- Improved animal health: Spot weight stalls or drops early, and act before issues escalate.
Best practices for weight tracking
You're busy, and regular weight tracking can be time-consuming. But with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be.
Using technology like EID tags and automated data collection tools can help simplify record-keeping and analysis. These tools give you reliable data that backs your instincts, simplifies your record-keeping, supports compliance and improves your decision-making across the board.
With the help of EID tags, you can easily follow these simple practices to get the most from your weight tracking:
- Schedule weigh-ins every 4–6 weeks to monitor progress and catch issues early.
- Schedule weigh-ins at key growth stages, such as weaning and pre-sale for accurate monitoring.
- Weigh at the same time of day, or at the same point in their grazing cycle, so animals carry a similar amount of gut fill. This ensures consistent and accurate results.
- Wean based on weight, not just age, to account for individual growth rates and leads to better lifetime performance, including growth rates, feed conversion, and breeding readiness.
Monitoring weights is key for profitability, animal welfare, and achieving your long-term goals on farm. You can only manage what you can measure, and with the tools of today, weighing has never been easier, putting accurate, real-time measurements of individual animal performance at your fingertips.