Weight sessions — record and import cattle weights

What this page helps you do

Weight sessions records a measured or estimated live weight for one or more animals on a farm-local date. Repeated dated weights support growth curves, daily liveweight gain and finishing forecasts. A session is a weighing event; it does not change the animal’s identity, move it or sell it.

Open Livestock → Beef → Weight sessions on a Beef or Mixed farm. The list shows one row per session: Date, Method, number of Animals, Avg weight, Recorded by and session Notes. It displays 20 sessions per page. The list rows are for review; they do not currently open a session detail screen. To inspect one animal’s growth history, open that animal’s detail page.

New session requires the farm’s Record weights permission. Import is restricted by the service to a farm Owner or Manager, although the current page can also show it to another role that has Record weights permission. If Import returns an access error, ask an Owner or Manager to run it.

Record a session manually

Select New session. If you open the same form from an animal’s detail page, that animal is already selected and the form stays in single-animal mode.

Control	What to enter
Session date	Required farm-local date; initially today. Use the date the weighing actually occurred. The manual picker currently permits a future date, but a future weighing is not a completed observation and should not be recorded here.
Method	Required Scale, Tape estimate (girth) or Visual estimate. Scale is selected initially. Mark an estimate honestly so a reader does not mistake it for a measured scale weight.
Session notes	Optional context for the group, up to 1,000 characters.
Pick animal	Search or scan a tag, speak it or use an available NFC reader. Each chosen animal gets a row and is excluded from the picker to prevent choosing it twice in this session. Check the displayed tag and name.
Weight (kg)	Enter an animal’s positive weight; the server accepts 0.1–9,999.9 kg. A picked row without a weight is not sent.
Remove row	Removes a mistaken draft selection in group mode. The preselected animal cannot be removed in single-animal mode; use Cancel instead.

The Save (number) button counts rows with a weight, not merely animals picked. Review the count and values, then save. The service rejects a repeated animal within the same session, an unknown animal, an animal from another farm, or a weighing dated after the animal left the farm. It does not currently prove that the date is on or after the animal’s birth or arrival.

A manual save always creates a new session. It does not detect or replace another manually recorded weight for the same animal and farm day, so check the animal’s existing growth history before saving a correction. A successful message gives the number of weights saved. Check the new session row and the animal’s growth view; missing, duplicated or implausible earlier weights can make downstream daily-gain figures incomplete or misleading.

Import a weigh-scale CSV

Select Import and choose the Weigh date (today by default, with future dates disabled in the picker). Upload the scale CSV, map the columns and review the preview before import. The expected row fields are Weight (kg) plus at least one identifier: Visual tag or Electronic ID (EID). Accepted weight range is 0.1–9,999.9 kg, and one import can contain at most 5,000 rows.

The importer matches a visual tag first, then an electronic ID, including historical identifiers valid for the chosen weigh date. It only records matched active animals on this farm. If one animal appears more than once in the file, its last valid reading in that file wins. When there is one existing active same-day weight, an identical value is Unchanged and a different value Replaces it. Check Replaced, Unchanged, Unmatched identifiers and Skipped rows in the result before treating the import as complete. Resolve unmatched tags in the animal identity records rather than guessing an animal.

Review the resulting session and individual animal weights after import. If duplicate same-day manual weights already exist, the importer currently replaces only one of them; the remaining duplicate needs an approved correction path rather than repeated imports.