How to collect individual animal data
So you’ve decided its time to make the leap into collecting individual animal data, and to use it to drive on farm decisions. But where to start. It is now cheaper and easier to collect data than ever before, but choices around what to collect, how to collect it, when and why can be more complicated. This post will take you through those so you can start your data journey with confidence.
What to collect
The first thing that every farm needs to identify is what to collect and what is important to the business. This differs for each operation but should boil down to three questions:
What drives on farm profitability?
What can we control?
What do we need to know?
The driver of on farm profitability will differ by enterprise, it may be numbers of calves weaned in a breeding operation or it may be weight gain in a growing operation, for feedlots it may all rest on carcase quality and marble score.
As Producers there are many things that we measure but cant control, for example weather. These measures can be important in informing prediction but on an individual animal level it can be important to look at what you can control or in other words what can you change or select for. This can include pregnancy status, weight gain, breed or who you purchased cattle from.
The last factor is what do we need to know, this is separate from profitability as there are many aspects where you need to know individual animal data for management, compliance or biosecurity. This can include vaccination status, age, sex and pregnancy status.
You can find a full list of traits we suggest you may want to collect here.
How to collect
The first step in how you should collect that data is how you can identify individual animals. We suggest using RFID or NLIS tags as the most cost and time effective solution. These devices are mandatory in cattle in Australia and New Zealand and gaining popularity elsewhere. Alternatively some producers prefer to use visual management tags to identify animals this can be cheaper and allows for easy visualisation in the paddock but comes with the risk of duplicates and requires a more manual process when collecting data. Many producers choose to use a combination of the two to benefit from paddock visualisation and easy data entry crush side.
Most of the individual data will be collected at the crush. In order for it to go smoothly you need a good crush, a set of scales and a crush side data collection device. If using RFIDs you will need a RFID reader.
Generally cattle will come into the crush, the RFID will be read and then the weight and other individual animal data will be entered into the crush side device.
You can read more about the merit of using a crush side device vs paper records here.
When to collect
It is easiest to collect the relevant data on animals in line with your usual management practices. This would mean collecting fertility data at pregnancy testing, collecting lactation status at weaning and collecting weights at induction, weaning and if required more regularly through out the year.
Why collect it
As you can see data collection is a big undertaking and investment. The most important and often ignored step is looking at the data and making decisions based on it. This can often be the most overwhelming part of indiviudal animal data as after a long day in the yards the last thing you want to do is spend the evening in the office. This is where a data analysis and visualisation tool like Black Box can help. With the hard work done you can simply upload or sync the data across so you can quickly and easily see important insights from your data.
If you been used to crunching data in excel sheets then have a read of this blog post explaining the differences.
Individual animal data isn’t a small undertaking but can drive real profitability and productivity within your business. If you need help taking the next step then get in contact with our team.