Five Reasons Why You Must Weigh Your Livestock Regularly

If you raise livestock, having an accurate and reliable scale is a must. Regularly weighing livestock in Montana helps monitor their growth and health, among other important functions. As a ranch manager, your profits depend on keeping livestock healthy and happy. Here are the top five reasons you need to weigh them regularly:

• Know their need for feed: Constantly weighing your animals helps you keep an eye on their health. In turn, their growth will determine whether you need to increase or reduce your feed. Scales can collect and store the data, which makes it easy to see patterns over time. This helps you find the appropriate feed conversion ratio and make any necessary changes to their diets. For example, you might need to adjust their nutrients or the feed proportions in order to find that sweet spot.
• Monitor their health: As you know, you can’t afford to have sick animals on your farm or ranch. One of the benefits to weighing the livestock regularly is that you’ll quickly see if they’ve dramatically gained or lost weight. If so, you can contact your veterinarian right away and take necessary measures to keep the rest of your livestock healthy. Identifying the problem as soon as possible helps prevent any illnesses from spreading to the rest of your livestock.
• Find out when the best breeding times are: As you know, breeding your livestock is a critical function of working on a ranch in Montana. Weighing your livestock regularly not only helps monitor their food intake and general health—that data is also helpful for identifying the best breeding times. Keeping their weight data on hand makes it easier to determine when they’re ready to breed, which will in turn benefit their and their calves’ health.
• Monitor breeding performance: Similarly, you can monitor your livestock breeding performance, which will help you figure out which breeds are the right ones for your farm. Keeping an eye on their weight gain is crucial to identifying the best breeders in the herd. The ones who constantly gain weight are usually the ones who give birth to the healthiest calves.
• Pick the right weaning time: Finally, weighing your livestock will help you pick the right time to wean your calves from their mothers. As you probably know already, picking the right weaning time is crucial to integrating the calves into the herd. Additionally, you can compare their weight data to the other calves or previous calves to get an idea of how particular animals or breeds perform over time.

As you can see, regularly weighing your livestock in Montana is the key to keeping your herd healthy, safe and happy. You can prevent disease and maximize your livestock profitability when you use accurate livestock scales from Rockwell Scales. We also offer service contracts so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your scales on your own. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our scales and services, get additional tips for livestock weighing and more.

Categorised in: Livestock Scales

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