Whether you use a sophisticated electronic weighing on your cattle crush  or simply a spring balance, weighing your animals is one of the key performance indicators for farm efficiency and breeding improvement. It is also probably the easiest way to maximise your profit whilst minimising your feed cost, save money on vet and med by correctly dosing your animals That is why we take weighing very seriously.

Your choice of equipment will be largely dependant on the size of your herd and your interest and commitment. You may enter weights manually, import direct from EID readers such as the Psion WorkAbout pro, APR500 or direct from weighing units like the Tru-Test XR3000, SR3000, ID3000, EziWay 6 or 7. You may also import weight data from CSV files generated in Microsoft Excell or similar tools.

In practical terms manually reading tags and recording weight records on paper for later input into the software is not as hard as you may think. It is very unlikely that you will weigh more than 30 animals in a session unless your throughput of animals on your farm is very high. However automation can obvously help. Whether EID is practical or worth the cost is a question you have to answer for yourself, again this will depend on your frequency of weighing and the number of animals.

Weighing Cattle with an hydrolic catle crush,Digital weighng,EID and FarmIT 3000 Cattle Console. Note the 28" Screen in the top left corner?

One very key decisions to make is 'do  you want the information to hand whilst you weigh your animals'. Weighing cattle is a big job and health and safety has to take presidence. You need to be able to get your animals from the field or shed to your crush with the least stress to both you and the animals and without risk to either of you. Therefore we would strongly recommend only considering the finer points of data collection once you are happy with your handling system. However the real problem is that you really need to know the animals weight gain and its history when you have it in front of you in the crush.

The idea of taking your PC or laptop to the cattle crush may seam rather daunting, however they are plentifull and a second hand one can be very cheap so why not! You may even have an old laptop that could be given a new use.

And why not make it permanant by putting it in its own cabinent and connecting it to the house or office by wifi. There is no reason why not so what is the real benifit. Weigh heads like the Tru-Test XR5000 are hard to improve on, however they do have two limitations. The first is that We (border software) are not in control of how they work, the second is that they do not have full access to ALL of your data.

So as an alternative we developed a specific mode of operation within the FarmIT 3000 Software - Console Mode.

Console Mode - FarmIT 3000

The console is specifically designed to provide instant access not only to the weight and weight gain, but also the time / days on farm, purchase price, cost per day and estimated current value. It also records your weight data straight into your FarmIT 3000 database, and allows recording of Movements, VET and Med, TB testing, PD 'ing' etc. and provides movements warning for animals withdrawl periods. This giving easy access to Farm Assurance status and medical history.

Console Mode - FarmIT Mobile on Andriod

Console mode has also been added to our FarmIT Mobile solution for Andriod and works very well on a 10" Andriod tablet. Although it also works on a phone the screen size of the phone tends to limit the usability

Irrespective of how you collect the data and how much you have of it, we need the tools to analyse that data and then go on to the selection of animals, to keep or cull in order to improve. Weighing your animals is only the start.

FarmIT 3000 allows you to not only record animal weights and analyse those weights for individual animals or groups, but also to assess breeding Dam and Sire by the performance of their offspring.

We also provide export reports for SIGNET in the UK.

The main point to consider is exactly what method of data collection will suite you best. Our experience has shown us that although an EID cattle crush will seem expensive, it greatly reduces the tedium and stress associated with weighing your cattle and therefore results in you weighing them more frequently.

Assessing an individual animals weight records allows you to review daily live weight gain between recorded weights or as an average since birth. This does however rely on having a birth date for the animal and birth weight. The system does however allow for a default birth weight so you do not have to get your scales out whilst calving unless you are very keen to do so.

A weighing point is a specific day on which we would like to compare animal weights. It is defined by a target day for example 100 and a date range, in this case 85 - 115 days.

The aim is to allow us to compare animal weights at a specific point, however it is extreamly unlikely that you are going to way your cattle on the exact day (for each animal). So the weighing point defines a range in days. The software will then calculate a theoretical weight for the animal based on the closest weight record to the target day and its DLWG at the time.