AgriWebb’s Weight Forecaster: plan ahead with confidence
There aren’t many situations in farming where you get to accurately look into the future to help you make decisions. Forecasting, budgeting and planning are critical parts of any business but especially when your business is so reliant on outside forces such as weather, markets and prices.
We designed the Weight Forecaster to give our individual animal management customers the ability to put their weight data to work for future decision making. In this blog I will cover the use cases and questions the Weight Forecaster can help you answer.
Sale weights and meeting forward contracts
With many operations being at the whim of the market or relying on a stock agent’s phone call to move animals on, we wanted to give some power back to the producer with the Weight Forecaster’s ability to take your current weights and project them up to 3 months in the future. Not only do we project the weight your animals will be on a target date or in 3 months’ time, we also suggest the required average daily grain (ADG) needed for those animals to achieve that weight. Giving you the information to decide paddock rotations, supplementary feeding plans or changes to your grazing management.
Instead of you making decisions on the last weight, if a forward contract, sale opportunity or the stock agent calls asking “how many do you have”, you can sit in your office, review the Weight Forecaster and make an educated decision on how many and when your animals will be ready to maximise the opportunities presented to you. In turn, hopefully improving your bottom line by selling your animals for the best price at the best time.
Maximising your joining success
With many producers shifting to ewe lamb and younger heifer joining it has never been more critical to make sure your females are at the right weight for joining. Weight is well known to be one of the most significant influences in contraception of young females (https://futurebeef.com.au/resources/heifer-management/) and is often referred to as the Critical Mating Weight (CMW). With the Weight Forecaster you are able to set your joining date as your target weight (as long as it is not further than 3 months away) and understand based on the weights you have been collecting and the ADG we are calculating, where your females will weigh in at that date. When a target weight is not set, like in this example, we split your animals into bottom, mid and top so you can identify your underperformers and those that are just meeting the average. This information allows you to change the management of specific animals to ensure they meet that CMW ready for joining.
Most publications suggest that heifers should be at 66% or higher of their mature body weight and most maiden ewes should be within 90% of their mature body weight. Using this as your target weight and your joining date as your target date, we can give you the required ADG in the Weight Forecaster for you to decide the best supplementary feed, pasture, or grazing rotations on your property to ensure your females are on a rising plane of nutrition coming into joining. Once again, making these critical decisions with the information that the Weight Forecaster can provide you, can directly impact the success of your fertility season.
How to utilise the Weight Forecaster
The Weight Forecaster is one of our first forecasting and planning features in AgriWebb. It is available to customers on our Individual Animal Management performance plans.
To utilise this feature effectively, producers should be regularly weighing animals in our live sessions or importing this information from their weigh scale. If this is done regularly we are then able to calculate the average daily gain these animals are doing between weights. If you aren’t able to weigh your animals regularly you can use our assumed daily gain record to estimate how much the animals would be putting on and we then calculate their estimated weights.
Lastly, to make the Weight Forecaster easier to use we recommend setting up your enterprises and management groups for easier filtering and to ensure you are comparing an accurate cohort of animals to each other.
We are really excited to see the opportunities for confident decision-making that our forecasting tools like the Weight Forecaster will allow.
Existing customer? Reach out to the team by calling 02 8417 3054 or use the live chat function in the app, or visit the help centre. New around here? Call 02 8311 4675 to chat to the sales team.
