How Our Scales Help California’s Dairy Farms

Any livestock farmer will tell you that regular weighing of the animals is an extremely important part of proper livestock farming. Fortunately, advances in scales have made weighing procedures easier than ever before.

Here are a few examples of the ways livestock scales in Montana can benefit dairy farms throughout the West and beyond:

• It helps you keep track of the animals’ health: Unhealthy animals typically have slowed weight gain or begin to lose weight. Therefore, careful monitoring of all animals’ weights will let you know if one is showing any early signs of illness. Noticing a slight change in weight early on will give you the chance to have the animal treated early, which will avoid a serious illness that could in turn spread to your other animals.
• It helps you track weights for breeding purposes: Animals must be in a specific weight range before breeding. Therefore, staying up to date regarding the weight of your animals will help you make better breeding-related decisions, rather than leaving it all up to guesswork. Beyond determining when is the right time for an animal to breed, tracking the animal’s weight will also help you determine breeding performance. You will be able to tell which breeds gain weight faster as you analyze your weight data collected over the years. In doing so, you could determine which two breeds you can cross-breed to improve growth rates.
• It helps you determine when to begin weaning: For younger animals, weighing is just as important as for the larger ones. Calves, for example, can have their future growth predicted by analyzing graphs of past weights. This will help you as a livestock farmer determine when the best time is to begin weaning that calf.
• It makes it easier to measure feed conversion: Correct and accurate measurements of weight gain make it easier for you to determine feed conversion rates among your animals, which will in turn help you decide on the correct feed portions. As a result, you will avoid overfeeding your animals and making them become overweight. This will also make it easier for you to set specific weight goals for certain times, and to hit those goals through proper feed levels.
• It allows you to automate weighing processes: Today’s livestock scales are more advanced than they’ve ever been. These scales are automatic, which means they are significantly less labor-intensive than older technology. They also have an advantage over traditional scales in that those older scales might not actually reflect the weight of the animal—modern, automatic scales have a negligible margin of error.
• It makes it easier for you to determine sale prices: If you are to sell off any of your animals for any reason, having an accurate weight measurement will make it easier for you to determine a fair asking price for the animal.

These are just a few of the reasons why our livestock scales in Montana are so beneficial. Contact Rockwell Scales today for more information.

Categorised in: Livestock Scales

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