The benefits of EID recording

This means you can more easily identify those sheep which are making the greatest contribution to your farm income and profitability, and those that are costing you money.

EID recording can deliver better profitability for your sheep business by:

• Improving the selection of stock for breeding.
• Improving the selection of stock for slaughter.
• Enabling the more effective use of veterinary medicines, eventually leading to improved flock health.
• Enabling you to achieve an economy of scale by managing a bigger flock, as well as the ability to assess the performance of individual animals.
• Enabling you to record extra information, for example lamb performance from different areas of your farm. This can help you to identify pastures where sheep are performing poorly.
• It can also help your reseeding plans and help to reduce reliance on bought-in feeds.
• Reducing waste and generating savings on waste disposal.
• Offering the opportunity for you to share information more easily with your vets so that they can have a greater understanding of your flock health needs.
• Offering the potential to use information that can improve the marketing of your stock.

• It saves having to write down individual IDs, dates and activities. This means that information can easily be collected on large numbers of animals, quickly and more accurately. It reduces the levels of mistakes and paperwork used in animal movement records/medicine books etc.
• There is no need for direct animal contact to achieve accurate identification. This means that IDs can be collected without the need to read the ear tags manually, increasing speed and safety for those involved. Health and safety risks can be reduced even further by using a data reader with an automated weigh scale / shedder.
• The IDs and management information can be loaded directly onto your computer, reducing the time spent on transcribing information into your flock book, computer or other resource.
• Farm management software lets you analyse the data you’ve collected, giving you the management information on which to base decisions relating to flock performance.
  EID gives you the opportunity to have all the information at your fingertips – a data reader held near to the EID tag gives access to all of the stored information relating to that particular animal. This can be particularly useful with respect to drug withdrawal periods as lambs reach finishing. In some cases information can also be linked to your smart phone.
  EID reduces labour costs significantly as more animals can be managed effectively by less people. The combination of automated equipment with EID offers the ability to automatically identify animals as they come through a handling system, so that more animals per hour can be weighed and sorted. This can be a major benefit to extensive farming systems.
• EID increases the opportunity to run ewes and lambs through electronic weigh crates more frequently than would be possible manually, allowing you to keep an eye on the condition of ewes after weaning and lamb weight gain. Any ewes that do not regain condition may have a long term issue, and lambs which are not hitting target weights can be checked for health problems, such as worms or footrot.
• EID allows sheep farmers keeping large flocks which are regularly moved between holdings to record movements quickly and easily and to keep track of where individual sheep have been.
• The improved information flow enables you to make more objective and timely decisions thus improving performance of your flock and business.

EID offers lots of opportunities. The key to using it effectively is not making it too complicated and using the technology to the level that you can see a benefit and return from, beyond what is required for simple identification purposes.