We had an interesting call yesterday that got us thinking about the concept of “Missing Weight Gain” – and the lengths we go to in order to prevent it.
The call was from David Wells – he and his wife Indrani run cattle just south of Ballarat in Victoria and have had their Optiweigh since April this year. During the call David told us about a recent experience around weight gains.
The situation was pretty simple – steers on good feed, that looked healthy, but weren’t putting on any weight (leading to the dreaded 0.0kg/d figure on the daily Optiweigh email).
So they set out on a search for answers. Eventually they found that it wasn’t the feed, it wasn’t the water and it wasn’t internal parasite burdens – it was Copper and Selenium deficiency – diagnosed with a blood test. So it was a sub-clinical deficiency – not severe enough yet to present readily observable symptoms – but enough to severely impact weight gain.
Undiagnosed, the symptoms would eventually have become evident – but it would have taken much longer – by which time there would be more grass eaten that had not been converted into weight gain, and probably weight loss. But with the early diagnosis David and Indrani quickly administered a supplement, and the weights suddenly started to improve again. In David’s words: “In 5 days the ADG went from 0 to 1 kg per day”. Just a glance at the chart tells the story…
For the Optiweigh team such conversations happen quite regularly – and the culprit has been found to be everything from nutrition to animal health, and even the weather.
But this one in particular got us thinking about just how big the opportunity cost of missing weight gain might be. If David and Indrani had waited until the symptoms of the deficiency appeared there would probably have been at least another month without weight gain – which is effectively a month of no income. This led us to draw some conclusions on two questions:
- What proportion of livestock businesses are not generating weight gain income at times when they should be? Answer: From all the situations we have seen in this office: a very large number.
- What is the cost of that lost weight gain income? Answer: Pretty huge when you think about all the expense incurred in nutrition and animal health in the hope of ensuring good weight gain outcomes.
The second answer raises some more interesting thoughts. How much of what we do to underpin weight gain is effective? And how do we find the balance between covering all bases and not doing enough. Whether it’s pastures, supplements or animal health – one way or another we need to find the right balance between spending money to achieve the best outcome possible – and compromising that by missing something.
In the case of David and Indrani we found that monitoring weight changes in real time with Optiweigh could be the secret to finding the perfect balance.
If you’d like to know more or talk to one of our team about Optiweigh and the advantages it could offer on your farm contact us here