Pablo Luna
@monca
Are you having difficulty navigating how to manage your ranch and cattle? You’re not alone.
Running a ranch and cattle exceeds the demands of most regular jobs. It definitely doesn’t start at 9 or end at 5.
There’s a lot to manage. From taking care of the cattle, facilitating production and sales, being a good employer to employees, and keeping the entire ranch clean and maintained.
Here are tips and advice on how to manage your ranch and cattle better.
Automatic Machine Sorting
One of the most important things to sort out if you’re going to effectively manage your ranch and cattle is sorting and weighing.
Sorting out your cattle is a big deal on a ranch. Sorting is how you separate males from females, the strong from the weak, and the fertile from the sterile. Because of this, sorting is time-consuming. It’s precisely because of this that you need a ‘concept to completion’ turnkey solution that’ll mean a ready-to-go, full package, easily implemented solution to sorting.
The answer is an automated sorting system. Here are three good reasons why you should go automatic.
Time-Saving
An automatic sorting system is a lot faster than human labor. There’s none of the repetition, stopping for breaks, wasted time, and hours spent writing down the data.
Say you have to sort 200 sheep. This can take up hours of labor working time. But using an automatic system means this job can get done in a matter of minutes.
Zero Mistakes
Humans are prone to error. It’s a fact of life that the most efficient, detailed-oriented worker will still make a few mistakes one way or the other. A cow may be mistaken for a bull, a pregnant ewe sorted among rams, or the weights of cattle interchanged.
An automated system eliminates error, eliminating guesswork and possible sorting losses.
Greater Efficiency
Automated sorting systems weigh as well as sort out your cattle. This means it facilitates efficiency by providing more meat produced per foot of available floor space and data on activity, weight, growth, and sorting results in real-time.
Thus enabling you to stop feeding and marketing to average and instead of increasing the uniformity of your finishing groups and getting them to market on time without fail.
Electronic ID Reader
A key component of cattle and ranch management from the very beginning is cattle identification.
Cattle identification has both visual and management benefits; from simply telling one cattle from another to being able to track the growth and subsequent performance of your cattle. Because cattle identification is such a huge part of effective ranching management practice, there is a continuous need for its improvement. This has resulted in the increasingly popular use of electronic ID or reader integration RFID cattle tags in the cattle industry.
Designed to last for the lifetime of each animal, these are small button-like tags that are placed in the ear. Each EID tag has a unique 15-digit number printed on it which can be read by scanning the tag with an EID reader.
Check out these advantages of the electronic ID tags:
- Visual tags are susceptible to getting lost, damaged, and getting snagged on a fence somewhere. EID tags are very unlikely to get lost as they are small enough to be safely placed in the ear and designed for high retention rates.
- It’s a lot quicker to identify an animal by simply scanning their EID tag with the reader, rather than needing the animal to be completely still enough for you to be able to read a visual tag or tattoo number.
- Scanning EID tags, instead of manually writing down every ear tag number, not only means a tremendous amount of time is saved but also that error has been significantly minimized. For example, as the cattle are being worked or loaded into a trailer, their EID tag can be scanned even as they are on the move.
Keeping Your Ranch Clean
Animals are anything but clean, so a significant part of managing a ranch is cleaning it. The ranch houses humans plus animals, so good hygiene is essential for the health of all and sundry. While you should definitely budget for annual cleanup and maintenance projects throughout the year, there will be several things on the ranch that’ll require immediate addressing.
Carry a notebook or keep an app on your phone of areas requiring cleanup and repair to help you keep track of everything, including:
- The water sources of the cattle should be inspected daily. Dirty contaminated water sources, especially tubs and tanks, promote insect breeding and decrease cattle water consumption. Also, remember that wildlife can carry and spread disease through water sources, so make sure wild animals like deer, badgers, and other animals cannot access your cattle’s water sources whenever possible
- Remove weeds growing in the pasture and mow all areas where the grass is not glazed. Then, trim weeds and trees along fence lines and buildings before they have a chance to grow out of hand. This way your cattle ranch will be clean, and damage from falling limbs or weeds will be reduced, thus resulting in less costly repairs.
- Maintain the soil and water by fencing cattle out of streams to prevent contamination and erosion. Plant cover crops on all the barren areas, and reseed pastures as the need arises.
Cattle ranch management is possible with effective management techniques, productive day-to-day tasks, and routine repairs. The task that seems daunting is in fact manageable.
