Growing a Herd from 500 to 2000 Head: The Throf Farm Roadmap

This guide is for the owner of a commercial sheep or goat farm growing from 500 to 2000 head, with a supervisor and a team of workers. It shows how to run Throf at each point of that band: the Company plan up to 840 head, then a custom offer from the Throf team, with the web app on a laptop, Excel import, an RFID reader, roles for every person, and reports and dashboards you check daily.

Between 500 and 2000 head the nature of the work changes. At the start of the band a supervisor, two workers and ten pens may be enough. By the end you run 30 or 40 pens, a vet visits regularly, a part-time accountant handles the books, breeding is planned in batches and you sell lambs and culls every month. The hard part is getting each person to record their own work, and seeing the whole picture without picking up the phone.

The 500-2000 head farm at a glance

About the plan: as long as you stay under 840 head with 3 employees or fewer, the Company plan covers you, including permissions and employee activity, advanced reports and the feed-conversion dashboard. Once you pass 840 head or need more staff accounts, request a quote from the plans page with the «Request a quote» button, or call +966 920033734. The Throf team also enables web access with your subscription.

What you need to track

• Live count per pen and stage: how many pregnant, lactating, fattening, breeding males, and how many in isolation right now.
• Breeding batches and lambings: who was mated in which batch, who is close to giving birth (sheep gestation is about 147 days, goats about 150), twins and miscarriages.
• Deaths by pen and by month: a rise in one pen is an early warning of a health or feeding problem.
• Health programme: vaccinations following your local vet's schedule, treatments, and the drug withdrawal period before any sale.
• Feed and weight gain: stock in kg, daily use, and average daily gain in the fattening groups.
• Money per batch: expenses, sales, net profit and cost per head.

Step-by-step roadmap

Phase 1: from 500 to 840 head

1. Move to the web app on a laptop: at this size the laptop becomes your office. Open app.throf.com once web access is enabled with your subscription, read dashboards and lists on a wide screen, and leave the phones to the workers in the pens.
2. Import the herd from Excel in one go: prepare a file with each animal's number and tag colour (the pair is the animal's identity), breed, sex, birth date, pen, and mother and father where known. Use the same import later for every large purchased batch.
3. Make every group a real pen: name groups as you name pens on the farm, then change the stage of a whole group (pregnant, fattening, weaned, drying-off) instead of editing animal by animal. Classification by age and sex is automatic.
4. Add the supervisor and first employees with clear permissions: one account per person. The supervisor sees groups, tasks and health; a worker records meals, births and treatments only. Throf has more than 50 fine-grained permissions.
5. Make the daily operations log your control tool: every action shows its time and the name of the person who recorded it. Check it every evening instead of calling the supervisor.

Phase 2: crossing 840 head

1. Ask for the custom offer before you hit the limit: when you approach 840 head or need a fourth staff account, or accounts for the vet and the accountant, contact the Throf team so they prepare an offer that fits your headcount and accounts, and recording never stops for a day.
2. Widen the roles: give the vet permissions for health, isolation and vaccinations, and the accountant permissions for expenses, sales and finance reports, without the right to delete animal records. One employee can also work on several farms.
3. Switch on the RFID reader: if you use electronic tags, pair a Bluetooth RFID reader from the app. Reading a tag opens the animal's file directly, so weighing, vaccination and inspections across hundreds of animals go much faster.
4. Organise breeding batches: record natural mating or artificial insemination for each batch, then pregnancy, and assign tasks to prepare lambing pens from the tasks screen.

Phase 3: from 1000 to 2000 head

1. Track cost per head from day one: record the purchase price or production cost of each animal, let expenses add up (feed, medicine, wages, maintenance), and record every sale on the animal itself.
2. Follow fattening with weights: weigh fattening groups every two weeks or monthly, and open the feed-conversion dashboard to see average daily gain and the animals whose weight changed most.
3. Export reports on a schedule: about 20 Excel report types, for the whole farm, a group or selected animals: classification, pregnancy, newborns, deaths, isolation, drug withdrawal period, production cycle, finance and sales.
4. Turn the live dashboards into your weekly meeting: breeding hub, health, nutrition, daily operations and finance, reviewed on the laptop with your supervisor in half an hour.
5. Prepare each sale with the buyer file: check the drug withdrawal period report before any sale, and share the buyer version of the animal's PDF.

Fixed routine

Common mistakes on farms this size

• Running 1500 head from a phone only: a small screen never shows the full picture. Fix: owner and supervisor on the web app, workers on the phone.
• Waiting for the limit to stop you: crossing 840 head with nothing arranged delays entering new batches. Fix: request the custom offer as you approach the limit.
• Broad permissions for everyone: someone deletes by mistake or sees what is not theirs. Fix: permissions by role, plus a look at the operations log.
• Entering purchased batches animal by animal: it takes days and invites errors. Fix: an Excel import for every large batch, then a stage change for the whole group.
• Reports exported but never read: Fix: one report per decision each month (selling, culling, feed) and a finance dashboard you review with the accountant.

When to move to the next stage

If your herd passes 2000 head, if you run more than one site, or if each site has a manager who needs the web app and reports for you or your partners, move on to the guide for herds above 2000 head with Throf. If you are still under 500 head and thinking about your first employee, go back to the 150 to 500 head guide.

For a detailed setup plan for a farm of about 1000 head, read running a 1000-head farm with Throf, and to speed up field work with electronic tags, read RFID ear tags for sheep and goats. To compare every profile, start from which Throf setup fits your farm.