Sheep Industry News August 2024

DAN PERSONS Shearwell Data USA Sheep Handling & Data Collection

T echnology in the sheep world has been evolving for many gen erations and, while much seems

have a record of their previous weights and by watching the daily live weight gains of these lambs the producer can predict with reasonable accuracy how many lambs he will have available to meet the specifications of his buyer in the coming weeks. In the Midwest farmer feedlots, market lambs can be weighed on a regular basis with the larger lambs sent to market when they reach their target weights. These producers can also monitor the daily weight gain of their lambs to identify those lambs that have slowed down or stopped their progress, giving them the oppor tunity to sell those lambs that no longer have a profitable feed efficiency. This also allows for predicting how many lambs will be ready for market and slotting delivery times. Data collection can go well beyond just animal weights. There are producers tracking specific animals requiring special treat ments. They might be recording each animal that needed its feet trimmed, a wormer treatment, an extra nipple clipped, an inverted eye repaired, a misshaped udder or any number of other medical treatments. By studying these items and watching for individual trends they are reducing the labor needed to manage their flocks in the longer run. The data being collected on all of these lambs can be correlated back to the sires and dams of these lambs in order to discover those breeding animals that are either the “rock stars” or the “profit robbers.” RFID tags, readers, scales and sorting equipment provide little benefit without a concerted effort of the producer to review and analyze the data gathered. Good software, time spent analyzing the data and making decisions is the real silver bullet in this new management era. Just like I could use a weigh wagon instead of a yield moni tor in the combine to assess individual sections of a corn field, RFID is not required. But it is a wonderful tool to speed up the processes and make us more willing to gather larger amounts of data. This data can be instrumental in selecting the replacement females for our flock and for culling the non-performing animals we tend. As technologies continue to improve and we dream of new changes we could make, I think we will see companies come up with solutions to our needs. It might be tags with RFID and loca tion capabilities all in one. It might be tags that use bio-electrical circuitry to expand battery duration and it might be biological monitoring devices. We have seen genetic testing and assisted reproduction become mainstream in the last 10 years, and I am sure the same will hold true with a new way of collecting and utilizing data.

to have stayed the same in the basic way we have been raising our livestock there are changes that have taken place in the way we handle our livestock and collect the data we use. There have been some rather simple changes made. We have gone from working sheep in open pens to having well planned handling chutes designed for reduced stress on the animals and maximum animal flow. We have switched from using nails to screws and from climbing over fences to well-placed walk-thru gates. We have enlisted the use of tip tables to trim feet and dedi cated chutes for pregnancy scanning. All of this has been put in place to reduce operator labor and improve our efficiencies. We now usher in the new generation of handling equipment and data management tools. The newest weight indicators and load cells on the market can lock onto the weight of a mov ing animal in less than a few seconds and record those weights directly to a handheld device or to the scale head itself. You can add a Radio Frequency Identification tag reader to those scales to collect and record the tag numbers at the same time. With manual entrance and exit gates, the throughput of these scales can easily be 200 to 300 lambs per hour. The more advanced systems – with a scale, tag reader and automatic incoming and sorting gates – can be expected to handle 300 to 400 animals per hour depending on the operations taking place. Reading and recording visual ear tags has always been prob lematic in the livestock sector. We operate in less than pristine conditions and tags are often faded and covered in grime. The error rates of reading, writing and copying data from one media to another has been studied more than once and is found to be more than 15 percent. Add to this the fact that our operations have grown to larger sizes and our time has become more divided between either on-farm or off-farm obligations and the need to record accurately and at a reasonable speed becomes more evident. RFID can overcome this obstacle. Modern scales, RFID tag readers and high-quality software has given us a new toolbox to improve our sheep operations and meet the challenges of supplying our end customers with the product they desire. I have observed flocks using these tools to supply 75- to 90-pound lambs to an ethnic market on a regular basis. They are weighing lambs and sorting them out off of the pastures as they reach market weight. The lambs that return to the pasture

24 • Sheep Industry News • sheepusa.org