Weighing Sheep - The Basics

Whether you use a sophisticated electronic weigh crate with autodrafter or simply a spring balance, weighing your animals is one of the key performance indicators for farm efficiency and breeding improvement. Monitoring and understanding how your lambs are growing is key to becoming a better shepherd.

It is also probably the easiest way to maximise your profit whilst minimising your feed costs and save money on 'vet and med' by correctly dosing your animals.This is why we take weighing very seriously.

Reporting and Analysis Tools

There are of course a number of ways you can measure performance from weight records. however there are some points to consider. The animals weight gain will depend on its sex, birth status (single twin), genetics , feed and  its environment. The FarmIT 3000 software analysis tools therefore let you filter on such things to allow the direct comparison of similar animals. For animals reared under similar conditions, genetics should be the main factor effecting performance, therefore selection from these animals should improve breeding.

1. Individual Analysis

Assessing an individual animals weight data 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.

The system does however allow for a default birth weight so you do not have to get your scales out whilst lambing unless you are very keen to do so.

2. Weight Analysis

The weight analysis view enables you to review animal weights, dlwg and average dlwg for multiple animals. It also provides filters to allow you to easily select animals on sex, birth status, and even sire. You may sort your data by simply clicking the 'column' header, easily print the data or even export the data. Weight analysis include the animals basic information as well as related weight data.

3. Weighing Points and Analysis

Weighing points provide a specific analysis view for a specific day in the animal's life, for example 100 day weight. This is often more relevant to assesing an animals EBV within a breed and is widely accepted throughout the industry.

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 56 and a date range, in this case 46 - 90 days.

The aim is to allow us to compare animal weight at a specific point, however it is extreamly unlikely that you are going to weigh your sheep 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.

For example

We would aim to weigh all our animals within the date range at least once, based on our lambing period we would aim to pick a day that the bulk of the animals would fall within the period at the target age.

So lets say we record an animal, born on 04-04-2020 and weighed on the 04-06-2020 with an actual recorded weight of 22.5 Kg. Based on the animals previous weight we can calculate its DLWG at the time of 290 grams a day.

The animals age on the day of weighing was in fact 61 days. We therefore need to adjust the weight by 5 Days, by removing 5 x 290 grams (DWLG) from the recorded weight we can produce a 56 Day weight of 21.04 Kg.

Once we have completed the calculation for all animals, we can calculate the mean for the group and then the deviation from the mean for each animal.

4. Graphical Analysis

One problem for us is that we can only put a curtain amount of data on the computer screen at any one time. Although a bigger screen helps, analysising 2000 lamb weights is always going to be a problem. One solution is to provide the data in graphic format. Both the weight analysis and weighing point analysi view allow you to review your selected data in graphical form.

Graphically we can represent animals by a cross and distiguishing sires, sex and birth status etc by colour, we may 'double click' the entries to go direct to animal records and even select mutilpe animals to groups etc. It provides a extreamly good way of visualising your entire weight data.

5. Slaughter Carcass Gradings and Weights

You may even record carcass grades and display them on a standard grading grid. Slaughter house reports may also be recorded and the data imported via a flexible import routine. Once imported or entered manually you may review slaughter weight via reports or weight analysis. You may also review overall performance on the standard gradings grid.

TOP TIP!

Popup Menus For Animal Selection

All analysis views provide 'popup' menus for the selection of animals into management groups. This includes selecting your best lambs and then getting a list of their mothers at the click of a button. First in the analysis view you may select an animal by using your left mouse button and clicking on the animal in the list (double clicking opens the animals record card). To select multiple animals simply hold down the ctrl key on your key board and left click on another animal.

Now you have some selected animals, right click on one to pop up the menu!.