A FANCY new gadget has been sitting in a paddock at a South Coast farming operation for the past few months, and it's something sure to pique the interest of beef producers around the State.
Manypeaks-based beef producer Kent Rochester, together with his wife Michelle and sons Thomas and Kobi, has invested in an in-paddock self-weighing system that provides almost instantaneous weight data on his cattle direct to his iPad.
Kent and his family run a herd of 300 Angus breeders based on Koojan Hills bloodlines, along with a grassfed backgrounding program and the new blue self-weigher at their place - believed to be the first in use in WA - is starting to revolutionise the way the family runs its business.
"We've been looking for an in-paddock weighing solution for a while," Kent said.
"A lot of the stuff in this area is still in development but Michelle found Optiweigh online and got in touch with them, they sent one over and it's already paying for itself."
So how does a self-weigher work?
A lick-block is placed in the weigher above a small platform which the cattle place their front feet on.
As the cattle are at the lick-block, the weigher scans the animal's EID tag and weighs the front feet of the animal, then the liveweight data is bounced up to the cloud which can be downloaded almost instantaneously by Kent.
"It did take a couple of trys to get the cattle used to the weigher and we tried a few different licks, but now they have no problems going straight up to it," Kent said.
"Now I can pull up data on individual animals in the mob, as well as overall average data for the mob on my iPad and get those weights in real-time - it's a fantastic tool.
"We still weigh our cattle monthly, especially our backgrounding trade cattle, but now we can see how they're progressing in between those monthly weighs."
While the self-weigher is still a relatively new addition to the business, having only been in use for a few months, Kent said the added-value of this new technology was already making itself clear as opposed to the visual progress in the paddock between monthly weight checks in the yards.
"As I said, we've only had this Optiweigh for a few months but it's already adding value in a lot of ways," he said.
"The very first standout thing was when we had a big trade group that had about four weeks left before we had them destined to be weighed and trucked out.
"The grass looked good in front of them so we thought we still had solid weight gains in front of them.
"Up until that point they'd been gaining really well, so we put this Optiweigh in with them just to track them and see what was happening, but what it told us was that they had flattened out and were starting to not gain because the grass had run out before we'd thought it would.
"I didn't believe it so we brought them in and weighed them again and it turned out it was right and they'd flattened right out, so thanks to that information that we wouldn't have otherwise had, we were able to make decisions to deal with that by splitting them into different weight ranges and brought them over onto different grass with a bit more protein and got those gains back on track.
"It gave us a month where we would have just carried on until the next monthly weigh at which point we would have realised they'd done nothing for a month."
There were also early indications that the in-paddock scales will be able to provide valuable information on how the changing seasons translate into changes in the efficiency of the pasture program.
"We've been able to get a bit of a snapshot of the grass changing into standing dry feed prior to next season's growing period," Kent said.
"Hopefully, because we'll be getting much more regular weight-gain data, we'll also be able to track different grasses against each other and make management decisions accordingly."
In terms of getting a useful snapshot of information for a mob, Kent said it took just three or four days before he had enough information to indicate how well a group was doing before he could get the Optiweigh hooked up to the ute and moved on to the next paddock and next mob.
"We think we'll be able to rotate it around three or four groups before we would need to get another weigher," Kent said.
"At this stage we're still taking them in to get their monthly weights, but we may not even need to in the future.
"The scales also give us a breakdown of how many weight brackets we've got so we'll be able to use it to help book stuff in, you know we can ring the Lesters down the road and say we've got 80 which will be ready in three weeks or we can book a truck ahead of time - there are a bunch of ways it will be able to help us run our business."
When asked if he thought the new investment would increase the amount of 'risk' the business takes on by trading more cattle, Kent said he thought it definitely would.
"It will just help us maximise our business in general," he said.
"We spend a lot of time and money growing grass and this will help us harvest it better.
"We try to do our best at grazing management and this will be another tool we can use to make that process more efficient."
There's more potential now for chopping and changing in the grass program, with Kent saying there were always learning curves whenever they tried out a new pasture and this tool would help in that area too.
"We've been trying out a new brassica which we've been learning a lot about how to adapt the cattle onto in terms of supplements they might need while they transition onto it," Kent said.
"So the more we learn about those things, the faster we can get those transitions right and not have those lag times in weight gain."
Kent said he would absolutely recommend one of these self-weighers to his farming peers.
"Anyone who is tracking their weights and tracking their pastures and wants to see what's happening I think they would find this really interesting," he said.
"It's not on the same scale, but it's a step towards what the dairy farmers are able to do with the amount of data they can get from their cattle every day in terms of what's working and what's not.
"And I think it's already paid for itself in the few months we've had and what we've already been able to get from it."
In the long-term, Kent said the unknown potentials of what the self-weigher might do for his family's business was exciting.
"We're still learning about it and obviously there were a couple of ideas we had about what sort of information we wanted to get but I think there will be things we learn from it that we didn't expect to and that's what I look forward to in the coming months," he said.