Herds of 2,000+ Head on Throf: From One Farm to an Organisation

This guide is for owners whose sheep and goat herd has passed 2,000 head, on one big farm or across several sites, with a farm manager, supervisors, a vet, an accountant and 10 to 50 workers. Throf helps you move from a farm run by one person to an organisation: clear rules on who records what, one numbering system, permissions per employee and a monthly pack of figures for owners or partners.

At 2,000 head the owner can no longer see everything with his own eyes. Numbers reach him through the manager, the manager hears them from the workers, and every link in that chain can drop a detail or add an error. The real jump at this stage is not the head count but the way you work: every fact recorded in one place, under the name of the person who entered it, before it becomes an opinion around the owners' table.

The 2,000+ head farm at a glance

What you need to track

• The real head count per site and group, using automatic classification: unweaned, young stock, adults, mothers and breeding males.
• The breeding cycle: mating or insemination, early and late pregnancy, close to birth, newborns and twins, miscarriages.
• Health and deaths: vaccinations, treatments and isolation, dead animals per site, and drug withdrawal periods before sale.
• Feeding: meals, feed stock in kg, weights and average daily gain.
• Money: expenses, sales, cost per head and net profit per site.
• Recording discipline: what was recorded today, by whom, and which tasks are still open.

The roadmap, step by step

2,000 to 5,000 head: set the rules before the team grows

1. Write a governance sheet. One page saying who records each type of information and who reviews it (see the "Who records what" table below). This matters more than any setting, because it stops two people recording the same thing or nobody recording it at all.
2. Fix the numbering rule and ear-tag colours. In Throf an animal's identity is its number together with its tag colour. Give each site, or each birth year, its own colour or number range so the same pair never repeats when a second site opens. If you choose RFID tags, start with newborns and purchased batches.
3. Get the web platform with your custom offer. The Throf team enables web access with the subscription, so the manager and accountant work on a wide-screen dashboard on laptops while workers stay on phones.
4. Create one account per employee. The employees and permissions screen has 50+ fine-grained permissions: a worker records meals and notes, the vet records health, the accountant sees finance but cannot change stages.
5. Make the daily operations log a morning habit. Every action is stored with its time and the name of the person who recorded it, so the manager knows what was done without phone calls.

5,000 to 20,000 head: from one farm to several sites

1. Add each site as its own farm and import from Excel site by site. Within a site, import group by group and compare the count on the group screen with a physical count in the pen before the next batch.
2. Link the people who move between sites. One employee can work on several farms with the same account, which suits a vet or a senior supervisor who visits sites in turn.
3. Change stages for a whole group. At mating, weaning, the start of fattening or drying-off, change the stage of the group in one action instead of hundreds of single edits.
4. Use the RFID reader for weighing and checks. A Bluetooth reader links to the app and reading a tag opens the animal's file, which cuts typing errors with large numbers.
5. Follow the live dashboards weekly: feed conversion, breeding hub, health, nutrition, daily operations and finance, site by site.

Above 20,000 head: fixed reports, not improvisation

1. Lock the monthly pack. From about 20 Excel reports, pick a fixed list that comes out on the same day every month, scoped to a farm, a group or selected animals: classification, newborns, pregnancy, dead animals, fattening, finance and sales. Each animal sold can also have a buyer-version PDF.
2. Review permissions and the offer every quarter. Close the accounts of people who left, adjust permissions when roles change, and contact the Throf team to update the custom offer if head count or accounts grow.

Who records what

The rule: each piece of information has one person who records it and one who reviews it, and Throf's permissions turn this table into daily practice.

A fixed routine

Common mistakes on farms of this size

• The owner is still the only one recording. At 2,000 head everything waits for him. Fix: one account per employee, and the owner reviews.
• One shared login for workers. You lose the record of who did what. Fix: a personal account with set permissions for each worker.
• Opening a new site with the old site's numbering. Number and colour repeat and animals get mixed up. Fix: a colour or number range per site before the first entry.
• Editing stages one animal at a time. Hours are lost and errors creep in. Fix: change the stage for the whole group.
• Owner figures built from side files. They clash with the system and trust drops. Fix: the monthly pack comes only from Throf reports.

How to keep it working as you grow

Every expansion, whether a new site or a large purchased batch, goes through the same steps: the numbering rule, batch imports, accounts and permissions before the first working day, then joining the monthly pack. If you are coming from a smaller stage, look back at what you built in the 500 to 2,000 head guide. If your project is heading towards company size with many sites, read the 50,000-head project plan. To compare every profile, see which Throf setup fits your farm, and for roles in detail, read farm team tasks and permissions.