This post is an extract from CEO and Co-Founder, Bill Mitchell’s fortnightly Optiweigh Insights email newsletter. To get a copy in your inbox, SUBSCRIBE HERE.
From the laneway at 60 km/h, everything looked perfect. The grass was green. The cattle full, fat, and happy. Jacqui and I were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.
Everything looked good until we put an Optiweigh with the mob, and then the data told us otherwise.
Over the past 30 days, the cattle in the photo have gained an average of just 0.2 kg/day in weight. At this time of year, they should have been doing far better.
The feed looks great but in reality the season has changed, the grass has run to head, and the quality has dropped away. There is good quality feed underneath, but evidently the cattle are having to eat stalk to get to it, and that is filling them up with too much low-digestibility feed. The cattle are getting full, but not gaining weight.
We’ve made the classic mistake of assuming that because things look good, they are good. We relied on the old wisdom that “once the feed hardens off, the cattle really start doing well.” Not this time. The data tells a very different story.
The Optiweigh readings show the weight gains are at least 0.8 kg/day below where they should be for a month. That’s 24kg lost opportunity, and at $5/kg, it’s $120 per head. There are 185 head in this mob, so that’s a $22,000 reminder that looks can be very deceiving.
And it’s not just us. Across the country, we’ve seen similar patterns. Weight gains have dropped dramatically in the past month, and in some regions even turned negative.
In Central Queensland (graph above), the 14-day average daily gain actually went as low as -0.3 earlier this month before recovering radically in the last few days (we are confident in these numbers now because the number of operating Optiweigh units is giving us a sample size of over 7,000 animals).
The Optiweigh support desk has had plenty of calls from producers scratching their heads because what they see in the paddock doesn’t match the data.
For us, better grass management (maybe a leader-follower system) could have helped maintain quality. For others, it might be beyond control (you can’t stop cattle chasing a green pick). But whatever the situation, one thing is clear: knowledge is power. The sooner you see what’s really happening, the sooner you can act to manage the consequences.
The lesson? Don’t be an idiot like me and trust your 60 km/h laneway view … trust the data.