My weekend weighing cattle

Posted on December 10, 2013 Updated on December 11, 2013

Good Afternoon!

This past weekend on the farm was busy one. We set out to weigh one of our pens of feeder calves. I had two 4-H’ers here helping along with my family and one of my trusted friends. There were only about ten calves (all born this year). We decided on Saturday as a learning exercise (and a workout) we would tape the calves to get an estimate of the weight.

I should preface that all of our cows are worked with and have daily human interactions. I’m a firm believer that to raise good quality cattle, the more human interaction and the more you work with them, the better they turn out. This is imperative when you have children on the farm or frequent visitors as we have. Even our bull pen is safe for our 4-H’ers to go into (supervised of course). The couple minutes a day or week of working with your cattle can save a headache or injury later on the farm.

However, I digress – back to the story. We taped our calves ranging from 590-860 pounds. It was a scene of many laughs as we haltered them and flung the tape around them hoping not to get pooped on or worse. The process took a little longer than we had hoped (about an hour) but it was a necessary item to cross off our chore list. We also did a couple of the show heifers to track their progress thus far.

On Sunday, we decided to use our portable scale and re-weigh the calves. These calves were all being sold so we decided to use the scale as it is more accurate (and to see how accurate our tape is). I have to say using the scale is MUCH easier and much faster. The calves are in and out in no time and require little movement and stress. The results from the tape were +/- 50 pounds. Not too bad, however, that 50 pounds could have been lost profit which adds up over time. Make sure whenever you sell cattle by the pound (live weight) that your measuring tool is accurate to maximize your return.