Dairy Goat and Sheep Farm with Throf: A Step-by-Step Roadmap

This guide is for the owner of a dairy farm with roughly 100 to 600 goats or ewes milked once or twice a day, selling milk, yoghurt or cheese. With Throf you record each female's milk at every session, see who is producing and who is dropping, know when to dry off, spread kidding so milk stays steady, and check whether milk income covers feed.

On a dairy farm the daily questions are not "how many head do I have?" but "how much did we milk today, which doe dropped this week, who is due for drying off, and why is the bucket lighter this summer?" The roadmap below turns those questions into a fixed routine inside the app, shared by your milkers, each with their own account.

The dairy farm at a glance

Remember that the plan counts every head, not only the milking females: kids, lambs and males are included. See the plans page for details.

What you need to track

• Milk per head, per session and per day: the basis of every decision, not just the bulk tank total.
• Sudden drops: a doe or ewe whose milk falls suddenly needs an udder check before anything else.
• Production stage: lactating, drying-off, pregnant, close to birth, so you know how many will be milking next month.
• Breeding and birth calendar: spreading births across the year is what keeps milk steady.
• Udder health and treatments: every treatment recorded against the animal and date, because milk from a treated female stays out of sale as the product label and your vet direct.
• Feed against milk income: what you spend on feed, and what you sell in milk, yoghurt, cheese and young stock.

The roadmap, step by step

Day one: build the farm

1. Add your animals: each head with its number, tag colour, breed, birth date and dam where known. If you already have a list, import it in one go from an Excel file. With a Bluetooth RFID reader, scanning a tag opens the animal's file.
2. Split groups by purpose: milking, dry, pregnant, replacement kids and lambs, and breeding males. Your real pens should match the groups in the app.
3. Set the stages: change the stage of a whole group at once, for example the milking group to "lactating" and the pregnant group to "pregnancy", instead of editing animals one by one.
4. Add your team: create an account for each milker and supervisor, as your plan allows, and give each one only the permissions they need, such as recording milk and notes without deleting data or seeing finance.

First week: milk recording

1. Start recording milk per head: at each session the milker enters the quantity for each doe or ewe, morning and evening if you milk twice. If weighing at every session is too much, pick one fixed test day a week and stick to it. After a week you have an average for each animal, and the gap between strong and weak producers shows in the milk production and milking report.
2. Enter feed: record feed stock in kg and meals per group, and log feed purchases as expenses.

Every day: milking sessions

1. Record each session under the person who did it: the daily operations log keeps every action with its time and the employee's name, so you know who milked and when, and the daily work sheet sums up what was done.
2. Record any udder finding immediately: clots or blood in the milk, a hot, swollen or uneven udder. Enter it as a health record, move the animal to isolation if needed, and call the vet. Record the treatment the vet decides; the drug withdrawal period report is only a record of which animal was treated and when, while the period itself comes from the product and your vet.

Every week: producers and udders

1. Review the milk dashboard: watch the daily production trend and look for animals that fell compared with last week. A drop in one female is health information before it is production information.
2. Check the group's udders: one weekly round for the whole group, recorded as an inspection in each animal's file.

Every month: dry-off, culling, feed

1. Prepare the dry-off list: females close to their next birth, or whose yield has fallen a lot, move to the drying-off stage and group. The drying-off report gives you the list.
2. Pick culling candidates: low producers, repeat mastitis cases, and females that did not get pregnant. Record the sale per animal so it counts in your sales.
3. Compare milk with feed: the finance dashboard shows total sales, total expenses and net profit, and cost per head starts from the purchase price or production cost, then expenses add up. If feed costs more than the milk brings back, review rations and culling candidates.

Every season: the breeding plan

1. Breed in batches: instead of breeding everyone at once, mate groups in spaced batches so births spread out and you always have females in milk. Record natural or artificial insemination, follow pregnancy and the "close to birth" stage at about 150 days for goats and 147 for ewes, then record births, twins and newborns. The breeding dashboard brings it together.

A fixed routine

Common mistakes on dairy farms

• Recording only the tank total: you will never find the weak ones. Fix: record per head, even with one fixed weekly test day.
• Leaving dry-off to chance: a female milked right up to birth wears herself down and drops next season. Fix: a monthly dry-off list and the "drying-off" stage in the app.
• Breeding everyone at once: you get a flood of milk one season and almost none the next. Fix: spaced breeding batches followed in the breeding records.
• Treating without recording: milk from a treated animal gets mixed into the sale milk. Fix: every treatment is a health record under the animal, and the animal stays in isolation until the vet decides.
• Replacements from any kid: Fix: choose replacements from dams with steady yields in their records; see dairy goat milk records and the best goat breeds for milk.

When to move to the next stage

You have outgrown this setup when:

• Your head count passes your plan's limit, or you need more milkers with their own accounts.
• You want advanced reports and detailed Throf indicators to follow milkers and their activity; these come with the Gold plan and above.
• You now fatten and sell males alongside milk, so you have two income lines. The mixed milk and meat farm guide fits you then.

Not sure which setup fits? Start from the guide to choosing your Throf setup.