Scales: When close isn’t good enough

We have all had that odd carpentry or welding job where we left ourselves a little short, or long, in length.  You aren’t off enough to start over, but a little more precision would have made the project easier to finish and possibly looked a little nicer.  When I catch friends in this predicament, I often say, “must be a government job, close is good enough”.  For livestock producers, everything we do is driven by weight.  We are paid by weight.  We administer most of our animal health products by weight.  We make selection decisions based on weight.  Too often these weight determinations are estimations made with our eyes instead of a set of scales. 

It is true that some people are better than others at guessing live weights.  If you do it all the time, you may be better than those of us that do it occasionally.  On average, our eyes often fool us.  In fact, most miss the mark over 50% of the time.  A University of Minnesota (Wood et al., 2014) project that compared the visual estimation of weight by veterinarians, stockmen, and students found that weights were typically missed by over 10%.  Weight was usually underestimated and accuracy decreased as actual weight increased with subjects missing by an average of 300 pounds.  To drive the point home, let’s consider two key arenas where accurate weight determination impacts our farms and ranches. 

Health Management

With the exception of vaccines, the recommended dosage of our animal health products is determined by weight.  Often when applying a pour-on fly control product, we will set a dosage for cows and a second for calves as they go through the chute.  Considering we could have a 300 pound weight spread in our calves, when setting the dosage based on the heaviest calf, we could be spending an additional $0.45 for each average weight calf at each application.  If we set the dosage for the average calf, we could be underdosing half the group.  Pour-on’s are relatively cheap, but if we are administering them once each month, that can add up to an additional cost of $2.25 per head.  Again, it is cheap insurance, but when we take that same thought to antibiotics, the costs can swell.  When we overdose, we have added unnecessary expense.  When we underdose, we may have saved expense on that treatment but it could lead to pest/pathogen resistance, additional costs for retreatment and lost production.

Replacement Female Development

For many of our livestock species, research has shown that we should be breeding yearling females at 60% to 70% of their mature body weight.  Work from the University of Nebraska in beef cattle indicated that heavier heifers had a higher pregnancy rate than those that were less than 60% of mature weight (85% vs 73%).  They also had higher pregnancy rates as 2-year-olds (90% vs 75%) and higher calf birth and weaning weights (1.2 lbs. per 5% increase in weight at breeding).  The question for you is, what is the average weight of your older cows, ewes and does?

Options are available

One of the main arguments against frequent weighing of animals is time, and including weight checks can slow down the process.  The good news is the marketplace has given us options to speed up the job or even remove the time commitment from our decision-making process.  Scale manufacturers have all developed phone apps or computer programs which can be integrated with your scale heads to do all the recording for you.  In the time it takes you to administer a shot, the next animal in line can have their weight recorded for you.  There are emerging options where scales are integrated into mineral feeders and waterers, so that weights are recorded at every visit to the unit.  Several companies are developing video imaging tools that predict weight and body condition scores from images.

Although I picked two of the easier points to sell, pharmaceutical administration and heifer development, accurate weigh determinations add valuable data to your production system that can aid in sire evaluations and establishing marketing groups.  When you are looking for technologies to add to your operation, there is none that will have a greater return on investment than a set of scales.

I would like to remind everyone of the emergency preparedness survey that we are conducting.  The survey is for all Ohio agriculture producers, and we are seeking to get a better understanding of what they perceive as risks to human welfare and property on their operations.  If you haven’t completed the survey, you can access it at https://go.osu.edu/producer.  If you have questions about this project, or any other farm related questions, you can contact me at 330-264-8722 or yost.77@osu.edu

This article was previously published in The Daily Record.