Introduction to the challenge addressed

Knowing the daily growth rate of your animals is important to understand the profitability of your beef farm. But weighing animals is not an easy task. Animals like to rest during the fattening period. In Belgian most beef animals are Belgian Blues.

Description of Innovation

On a beef farm, a lot of animals need to be treated (hoof care, shearing, pregnancy diagnosis). If you can easily fix these animals in a treatment pen, which is equipped with a weighing installation, you know the weight of the animal without having to do extra work.

Impact on farm performance

A treatment pen equipped with a weighing installation is a simple adjustment to improve your housing system for cattle. The cost is limited to 1500 to 2000 euros, but allows you to easily monitor the weight of your animals to be treated. The weight can be stored in a management programme, so you know the daily growth compared to a previous weighing.

Audio-visual material

 

 

A weighing system that is put under the treatment box.

 

Farmer comment

“ We have a separate weighing box on the farm already longtime, but since we can measure the weight in the treatment pen, we use this very rare” .” We had already a good treatment pen and it was a low cost to install this digital weighing system on the pen. You don’t have extra work for this weighing , because you needed to fix this animal. We put the information in our management programme so we know the daily gain of weight very well.     Automatic weighing systems are too expensive for our farm.”

Further information

 https://stimag.nl/merk/bosche/