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.
I’m just heading home from New Zealand, where I’ve been setting up our office and delivering a few units. I love delivering units, but as our business has grown, it has become more difficult to get to everyone.
And while it is great to meet people and explain the units, that part really only covers the mechanical bits. It’s the data that comes in the following days, weeks, months, and years, where the value lies in an Optiweigh unit.
So, we try to get in touch with everyone to have a good chat about their data, but it isn’t always possible. Not that it’s particularly complicated data – it’s just that there is quite a lot that can be done with it, and I know some people feel they aren’t getting as much out of it as they could.
In the absence of being able to chat through this with everyone, I’m dedicating my plane flight home to jotting down two checklists:
A) 3 Things to Remember About the Data and
B) 5 Best Ways to Use It.
Here goes …
(A) Things to Remember:
- Attractant: Getting enough data all comes down to the attractant. It needs to be something the animals like, and they need to get a little reward for going there. That is where our sweet dry lick (Optiweigh Attractant) works so well in conjunction with the limiter plate. It smells good, it’s tasty, and the animals have to work at it to get a little bit. Other things, such as salt block, molasses blocks, protein meals, etc, can also work well – but they don’t all work in every situation – so you need to find something that works for your animals on your farm. And you need to keep it topped up.
- Sampling: Don’t get carried away by feeling the need to have a larger % of the mob weighing. For example, in cattle with a 150kg weight range, you only need 15% of a mob of 200 animals to be accurate to within 10kg. For sheep, with a 20kg weight range, you need only 10% of a mob of 500.
- Full Weight: The weights reported by Optiweigh are tailored to replicate a full yard weight. In practice, they are good enough to make marketing decisions, but as we all know, shrink can sometimes be a bit of a mystery. Get confident with the data from your farm by regularly doing comparisons, not only to your yard weights, but also to curfew weights at the saleyard or feedlot (and utilise our file upload facility to help with these).
(B) Using the Data:
- Get a quick snapshot of a mob: Put the unit in for a few days or a week to get a quick update on the progress of a mob. If you’ve had it in with them before, the Optiweigh system will recognise the tags and provide weight gain figures by animal.
- Leave it with a mob: Watch how weights change day to day. We are constantly amazed at the things people tell us they have discovered by doing this.
- Use the 14-day ADG as a ‘leading indicator’ only. Because it is a very short period of time to calculate weight gain, this figure is very sensitive to any changes, which makes it a great ‘canary in the coal mine’. The 30-day ADG is a truer reflection of the actual rate of growth.
- Look at the individual animal data: Using the ‘Data Over Time’ report (on the web portal) to summarise individuals by Day, Week, or Month is a great way of building confidence in the numbers.
- Engage your team: Make sure you set up individual logins for everyone with an interest in the data. You can do this on the portal, or we can do it for you (1300 678 493).
Making your data work for you is what we care about most at Optiweigh. We are currently working on some upgrades, including weight gain trends over time and the ability to analyse by mob, and/or paddock, along with setting target weights and dates.
In the meantime, I am also pleased to let you know that we now have a new look portal that displays much better on mobile devices. Check it out using the ‘Try New Dashboard’ button at client.optiweigh.io.