50,000-Head Sheep and Goat Project on Throf: Rollout Plan

This guide is for a livestock project or company with about 50,000 sheep and goats spread over several sites, with a general manager, site supervisors, vets, an accountant and dozens of workers. With Throf you roll out in phases: preparation, one pilot site, the remaining sites, then routine and governance, and every month the owners and the board get clear numbers from one system.

Running a 1,000-head farm and running a 50,000-head project are different jobs. On a farm, the owner needs to know what happens in the pens. In a project, the whole organisation must speak one language: one numbering rule, clear roles, a log of who did what and when, and reports that come out of the system rather than from each site's own spreadsheet. For the basics, read how to manage a large sheep farm with Throf. This article is the rollout plan for a company-sized operation.

The large project at a glance

What you need to track

• Head count per site and group by class: unweaned, young stock, adults, mothers and breeding males.
• Breeding: mating or insemination, early and late pregnancy, close to birth, births and twins, miscarriages.
• Health and deaths: vaccinations, treatments, isolation, drug withdrawal periods before sale, and dead animals per site.
• Feeding and feed conversion: meals, feed stock in kg, weights and average daily gain.
• Money: expenses, sales, cost per head and net profit per site and for the whole project.
• Team discipline: what was recorded today, by whom, and which tasks are still open.

The roadmap, step by step

Phase 0: preparation before any data entry

1. Agree on one numbering rule. In Throf an animal's identity is its number together with its ear-tag colour. With several sites, give each site its own colour or number range so the same pair never repeats, and write the rule on one page everyone follows. If you use RFID tags, decide now which sites start with them.
2. Create the sites and groups. Each site is a farm in Throf, and inside it the groups and pens match the ground: mothers, fattening, weaned stock, breeding males.
3. Map the roles. List every employee and what they need, then turn the list into accounts in the employees and permissions screen. Throf has 50+ fine-grained permissions, and one employee can work on several farms with the same account, which suits a supervisor or vet who moves between sites.

Phase 1: the pilot site (weeks 1-4)

1. Pick one medium-sized site and get web access enabled; the Throf team activates it with the subscription.
2. Import the herd from Excel in batches, group by group rather than the whole site at once. After each batch, check the count on the group screen against a physical count in the pen and fix errors before the next batch. After import, Throf classifies animals automatically by age and sex.
3. Run the full daily routine for at least two weeks: meals, health records, weights, stage changes for a whole group at mating or weaning, expenses and sales. At the end of week 4, export the classification report, the daily work sheet and the finance report and review them with management. What works here becomes the operating guide for every other site.

Phase 2: all remaining sites

1. Move sites one at a time with the same batch method, and do not start a new site until the previous one is stable.
2. Train each site supervisor on the operating guide from the pilot, and let them train their workers on the phone: find an animal, record a meal, add a note.
3. Switch on RFID where you have it: a Bluetooth RFID reader links to the app, and reading a tag opens the animal's file, which cuts typing errors at this scale.

Phase 3: routine and governance

1. Check the daily operations log every morning: each action is stored with its time and the name of the person who recorded it, so the manager sees what each site did without phone calls.
2. Use the live dashboards for weekly follow-up: feed conversion, breeding hub, health, milk, nutrition, daily operations and finance.
3. Build the monthly board pack from about 20 Excel reports, scoped to a site, a group or selected animals: classification, newborns and births, pregnancy, dead animals, fattening, finance and sales. Each animal sold can also have a buyer-version PDF.

Who records what

The idea is simple: every piece of information has one person who records it and one who reviews it. Throf's permissions enforce the table in practice: workers do not see finance, and the accountant cannot change stages. For more detail, read farm team tasks and permissions.

A fixed routine

Common mistakes on large projects

• Launching every site on the same day. The result is chaos nobody can trace. Fix: one pilot site first, then one site after another.
• Importing one huge Excel file without checks. A small error repeats across thousands of rows. Fix: small batches and a count check after each one.
• Different numbering at each site. Number and colour repeat and animals get mixed up. Fix: one numbering rule before any entry.
• One shared login for workers. You lose the record of who did what. Fix: one account per employee with set permissions.
• Board reports built from side files. The figures clash with the system. Fix: the monthly pack comes only from Throf reports.

How to keep it working as you grow

When you add a site or buy a large batch, do not start from scratch: apply phase 0 to the new site, then batch imports, then the same operating guide. Every new employee gets an account and permissions before the first working day. If head count or the number of accounts grows, contact the Throf team to update the custom offer.

It helps to treat each new site like a medium farm with its own supervisor and routine, as in the 1,000-head farm guide, before it joins the monthly pack. To compare every profile, see which Throf setup fits your farm, and to read the numbers in depth, see Throf reports and dashboards.