Days to Market
Knowing when your animals are ready is the key to plan your breeding & marketing schedules
If you are raising livestock for meat, knowing when your animals are ready for market is key. If you can not market your animals, there’s no revenue coming in. This applies to everything from meat goats to sheep and cattle. You could use benchmarks and estimates to figure out how long it takes to raise various livestock. You need to know your data specifically for the best results. This one bit of information can be used to make a lot of decisions for your operation. The upcoming spring issue of Sheep Canada has a detailed dive into marketing patterns for Canadian sheep and related statistics. As a companion, this article will walk through the technical calculations including a Google sheet you can use.
Unless you are doing accelerated lambing and lambing consistently all year, you are probably planning your lambing in an attempt to have them on the market at a specific time. The goal should be to produce a consistent high-quality lamb for your target market. There are a couple of steps to getting to that goal:
Know what your flock can produce, not all breeds excel at everything.
Figure out which market matches and likes what your flock can produce.
Produce lambs that meet market needs at the time the market needs them.
The easiest example here is our operation. We produce light lambs, up to 79 lbs. The Dorper genetics we use produce a nice lamb for that weight. These lambs are most desirable for specific holidays. Nobody is going to want them in September. So if I mess up my breeding schedules and my lambs are ready in late August, I will not get the best return. On the other hand, if I adjust my lambing and they are ready in March, I have better opportunities.
Important items to note:
I’m not here to debate whether the Canadian sheep industry should strive to produce a consistent lamb supply all year. Unfortunately, the market does not provide much incentive for that if you are primarily selling lambs through auction.
I’m also not here to support shipping your lambs all for one specific holiday, that can easily backfire.
I fully support planning your breedings as effectively as possible so you can market your specific lambs as best possible.
Information to Collect
Breed, feed availability and age are all going to impact how well a lamb gains and consequently how long it takes to reach market weight. It is key to critically analyze your own operation’s results. This can be done by tracking a few data points including;
birthdates,
when the first lamb is marketed from a group,
the last lamb from that group leaves,
shipping dates for individual lambs.
Depending on your herd management software, if you can record the selling information for a lamb, you can then generate a report that will provide you with the lamb’s birthdate and selling date. Both EweManage and BioTrack Plus offer reports allowing you to easily get this information.
If you can have this information in a spreadsheet, you can get the information you want quickly. The formula “DAYS” will calculate the number of days for you. The formula “COUNTIF” can be used to find out how many of those lambs exited in the desired date range. I have prepared a template document here that you can use. This Google sheet is in View-only mode, and you are welcome to save a copy for your personal use. No real data was used to produce the spreadsheet, it was set up for illustration purposes.
This is one area where averages are not ideal, since average means that 50% of the lambs did worse than you forecasted. Or you have decent results but you had some extreme outliers. A chart like this will provide you with some insight into how well your lambs are performing. The lambs out at the 220-day mark are costly for your bottom line.
Why It Matters
Knowing how long that takes will allow you to plan for breeding dates as well as decide when you should consider cutting your losses. Lambs kept too long on feed are costly. Average daily gain is not a constant. It will fluctuate with the season, feed ration and genetics. Research has shown that gains are 41% lower in the summer when temperatures are around 30°C. Feed efficiency is also significantly lower in the summer.
If your daily ration for lambs after weaning at 60 days costs $0.46 per day, a lamb that is ready to sell in 50 days is going to be better for your margins than a lamb that takes 100 days. That lamb cost you another $23 in feed. Considering lamb prices can drop $0.60 or more per pound in the same 50 days, underestimating your days-to-market and ending up in the wrong marketing window could cost you any margin you had on the lamb.
Make Assumptions at Your Peril
Assuming your lambs will be ready at 100 lbs in 100 days from lambing is likely going to put you in a bad situation. A standard benchmark for average daily gain is 0.7lb per day. Assuming your lambs gain 1lb per day is unrealistic unless you have the data to back that up. GenOvis data has decent insight on this. I used the 2022 national information to generate the following chart:
Each breed is slightly different. Additionally, you might have a different target market size. Using this information incorrectly to plan breedings would result in some issues. If you wanted lambs ready by March 1st, and you assumed your lambs would be ready in 100 days but they are not, it actually takes 165 days, they wouldn’t be ready until May. Here’s a small example of how breeding dates would change depending on how long it takes most of your lambs to reach market size.
Many more factors go into planning your breedings. However, not taking into consideration how many days it typically takes your lambs to be ready will only lead to disappointment come shipping time. If you want to know more about Canadian lamb, make sure you’re subscribing to Sheep Canada!
That’s all for today! Thanks for reading, I appreciate the support. Please let me know if you liked the spreadsheet, I can build more of them for future articles to help you with your own calculations. If you would like a custom one for your operation, I’m happy to help.
This needs to be distributed, many "conspiracy theorists" have been warning about the gubenment coming after your farm, or your 5 chickens, etc., and it's not only begun, it's continuing: https://youtu.be/unOXcKigSuY
Soon none of us will have any chance of eating healthy, we will only be able to get fake meat, bug flour, bug meat/protein, etc. from our approved sources of food, and if we try to grow or produce our own food, they will come after us and shut us down "to save the planet", unless we find a way to put a stop to it.
This will be coming to Canada very soon as well.