Tru-Test Weighing.

Weighing Cattle and Sheep with Tru-Test weigh heads and EID

For many, even the idea of weighing your cattle or sheep may be seen of little benifit outside of pedigree breeders or research establishments. The cost of equipment may also put you off, not to mention the handling of the animals. However the greatest gains may well be on the commercial sheep farm.

With customers paying higher premiums for 'Specification', tighter controls over 'Vet and Med' and higher feed costs maximising profits by better management is essential. Regular weighing gives you the tools to meet customer requirements and maximise profits. The days of the bounce scale are also long gone, for now digital weighing provides accurate results in half the time.

Fittings a static panel reader to a weigh crate completes the process with weigh data linked to specific animals, enabling treatments to be targeted, weaning to be adjusted and ewes to be culled. 

Of course you could do the weight recording with an hand held eid reader, simply press the button to read the EID tag, then key in the weight. (manually reading the bouncy scale or digital display). This is acheivable and for those of you with only 150 lambs to way, cost effective. Throughput will be slow. 100 an hour at tops!

With a static panel reader and good weigh head you should be able to acheive 200 - 300 an hour, for an automated drafting weigh crate such as the Prattley Autodrafter we would expect 400 - 500 an hour.

Tru-Test XR3000 and EID

The Tru-Test XR3000 is one of the best weigh heads on the market, being robust, reliable and very easy to read outside. Although not a cheap unit, it certainly does what it says on the tin and is in use by some of our more advanced customers. The XR3000 can be configured to operate with EID without any problem at all.

When used with a EID panel reader, the Tru-test XR3000 unit provides animal weighing and data collection at an extremely efficient rate, even a basic system, i.e XR3000 unit and EID panel reader fitted to a manual crush, can reduce the human intervention to a single button press and gate operation.

Static Panel Reader Components

 

The EID panel reader is used to automatically read the EID of the animal, passing it to the tru-test unit (which has already had the animal life data preloaded from FarmIT 3000) the XR3000 then finds and displays the Animals and proceeds to take weight measurements until the weight finally stabilises, at that point you are prompted to save the record, press the button and let the animal out. Now do the next one. With an appropriate weigh crate for example the Prattley weigh crates this can even further be advanced by automatically recording the weight and drafting the animal. p> Once complete you may return the XR3000 to your computer and download the animal weight directly into FarmIT 3000, have a cup of coffee and review the data.

The SR3000 and JR3000 may also be used with EID and are cheaper than the XR. However the life data facility of the XR3000 makes it my choice for the job.

With FarmIT 3000 you may automatically load all your animal EID's into the readers, with the XR this includes the 8 life data fields, unfortunately two fields have to be the Tag number and EID, however the other six fields maybe selected from the animals record, thus allowing us to include scrapie codes, age, breed, sex etc.

You may then draft animals on this life data, for example removing specific Scrapie Coded animals.

The lifedata may be displayed as you are weighing the animals and you may also update this data when weighing the animals and FarmIT includes the facility to download the data from the unit and automatically create the weight records within the FarmIT database.

Should an animal arrive that is NOT in the system, you are prompted to create a new life data record, complete the basic information, Ear tag number, sex, breed etc. When downloading the weight data FarmIT 3000 will give you the option to automatically create any animal records not already stored in the database. For example any lambs or new animals not in the farm IT database but found in the TruTest weight file maybe created.