Five Reasons You Need Your Own Livestock Scales

Scheduling regular weigh-ins for your livestock supports your ranch’s success. Never underestimate the importance of livestock scales—they offer advantages that you cannot secure any other way. Here are five reasons to install your own livestock scales at your Montana ranch and join the successful legions of those who use livestock scales:

• Better health monitoring: Most species of livestock, including cows and sheep, hide illness well. Many ranchers do not discover health conditions until the animal is dead or close to it. This situation becomes alarming if the animal catches an infectious disease that can spread through the herd. By monitoring weight, you can detect illness earlier and address it before it spreads. This way, an illness becomes an inconvenience rather than a disaster. Also, weight determines medicine amounts, and your vet can accurately assess that better if you have a livestock scale.

• Informed feed management: Finding the best feed is a challenge for most livestock. If you use feedlots, you do not always know feed quality, and frequently, it involves a lot of guesswork. A livestock scale removes most doubt. When you monitor weight, you can make better decisions regarding feed and portions. You know when you need to change feed or if your current plan works well.

• Improved breeding decisions: When it is time to pair up animals for breeding, you likely want to breed the ones who gain weight the easiest and most quickly. The best way to do that is with a livestock scale! You can use weight to determine the best breeding time and breeding pairs. Under-performing animals can be pulled from the herd for another feeding regimen, while the strongest performers are placed together to cross-breed. When you make informed decisions, you create stronger herds, and that means more for your bottom line in the future.

• Determining weaning time: When you regularly weigh calves, you can determine if they are growing properly and know when to wean them. If you wean them too late, they may fail to integrate with the herd and gain weight as needed. But if you wean them too early, you can stunt their growth. A livestock scale helps you avoid these mistakes and better support calf development.

• Better productivity: Livestock scales today are accurate, easy to use and comfortable for livestock. Many models are not much different from a pen, and animals mainly just walk into them for weighing. Today’s scales also contain memory so you can compare results and get a full picture of what is going on with your herd. The ease of use and better information storage improve accuracy on many ranches in the U.S. Consider choosing scales for single and multiple animals and trust that their utility will allow them to pay for themselves in no time!

Now that you know the importance of livestock scales, it’s time to contact Rockwell Scales to purchase them for your ranch. We understand who uses livestock scales and install them throughout Montana, Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota and Idaho. Call us today to get started on livestock scale installation.

Categorised in: Livestock Scales

This post was written by admin