Growth Path

The Growth Path tool is guide that helps you visualise and estimate the weights of your cattle at certain ages. This will assist you in filling out the Breedcow+ AE Calc and the Dynama+ AECalc sheets. It's also very hand in the Bullocks tool.

Important! The Growth Path tool does not automatically fill out the AE Calc sheets.

How to use the Growth Path tool

Upon entering the Growth Path page, the following screen should be displayed. It has some example values - but these won't necessarily match yours.(Hint: Click the picture to make it bigger!).

Step 1: The "One Calving Period Growth Model"

Firstly, forget the words "One Calving Period Growth Model". Think of the model as the ability to forecast a growth path for an individual animal and then use the forecast to assist in filling out AECalc. Next, think of your weaner mob as an average, individual animal.

For instance, what date would the "average" weaner in your herd be born? If you joined the bulls in January, and approximately 50% of your cattle were pregnant by March, in 9 months time you will have 50% of your calves! So we might expect average calving date to be sometime in December. In this example, we expect that to be 15/12/2019. Weaning date is typically the date when you wean - if you do several rounds of weaning - think about the "average" weaner.

The next yellow box "Male calf average daily gain birth to weaning" is used mostly so that our weaning weight is about right for our herd. We can check that a little later on.

The last yellow box in section 1 is "Percentage reduction in heifer growth rate compared to steers" - typically we use about 5%, however, if you have great data on this, feel free to change it.

Figure 2 - One Calving Period Growth Model