How to Manage a Large Sheep Farm with Throf: A Practical Guide

To manage a sheep and goat farm with thousands of head, you need one system for records, staff and reports. Throf is a herd management app for sheep, goats and camels on iOS, Android and the web (app.throf.com). On large farms, owners and staff work on the web platform from a laptop, each employee has an account with 50+ permissions, the herd is imported from Excel, and about 20 Excel reports are ready to export.

A small flock fits in the owner's head. Once the herd passes a thousand head, spreads across dozens of pens and needs ten or more workers, memory and a notebook stop working. The real question becomes: what happened today, who did it, and what did it cost? This guide shows a practical way to run a large farm on Throf, step by step.

What changes when the herd gets big

Sheep and goats do not change with scale, but management does. The pressure points on a large farm are usually:

• Data volume: entering animals one by one on a phone takes days.
• Many people: a supervisor, a vet, an accountant and pen workers, each needing a different slice of information.
• Group work: mating a whole pen or weaning a batch of lambs and kids in a single day.
• Daily follow-up: knowing what was done today without phoning every worker.
• Reporting to owners and partners: clear numbers on pregnancy, births, deaths, expenses and sales.

Throf is built around these points, which is why it is the first choice for breeders who have outgrown the notebook.

Large-farm problems and how Throf handles them

Step by step: setting up a large farm on Throf

1. Activate the web platform. Web access is enabled with the subscription by the Throf team; then open app.throf.com on any laptop.
2. Split the farm into groups and pens that match the ground. See organizing pens and groups for a practical layout.
3. Import the herd from Excel: number and tag colour (the pair is the animal's identity), breed, sex, birth date and group.
4. Let automatic classification work. Throf sorts the herd by age and sex into unweaned, young stock, adults, mothers and breeding males.
5. Create one account per employee and set exactly what each person can see and record.
6. Connect the reader and scale if you use RFID tags.
7. Make the daily work sheet and reports a fixed routine for supervisors and management.

Your team: one account per employee, precise permissions

On a big farm, organising people is harder than organising animals. In Throf each employee has their own account, and more than 50 permissions decide what they see and record. In practice:

• Pen worker: records meals and daily notes for their own group.
• Vet or health supervisor: records vaccinations, treatments, inspections and isolation.
• Accountant: enters expenses and sales and sees net profit.
• Owner: sees everything and reviews.

If you run more than one farm, a single employee can work on several farms with the same account, so a supervisor who moves between sites does not need duplicate logins. For role design in detail, read running a farm with a team.

Group work: hundreds of animals in one action

The biggest time saver on a large farm is working on the group, not the animal. When you mate a full pen, move a batch to fattening or start drying off a group of ewes or does, you change the stage for the whole group in one go.

The stages Throf follows are mating or insemination, early and late pregnancy, close to birth, birth (single, twins, triplets), miscarriage, weaning, drying-off, fattening and breeding males. Isolation is a separate health status for sick animals until they recover.

On the wide screen of the web platform, reviewing long lists and filtering by group or stage is much faster than on a phone.

Daily work sheet, reports and dashboards

The daily work sheet answers the manager's first question every morning: what has to be done today, and what was done yesterday? Reminders before vaccinations, births and drying-off sit alongside it. The vaccination programme itself always follows your local vet and the ministry schedule.

Throf offers about 20 Excel report types, scoped to the whole farm, a group or selected animals, including:

• Classification by age and sex, and the daily work sheet.
• Pregnancy, newborns, births, twins and lactating animals, natural and artificial insemination, miscarriage.
• Dead animals, isolation and drug withdrawal period.
• Milk production and milking, weight and body condition, fattening, drying-off and the production cycle.
• Finance and sales.

Each animal also has a PDF file in two versions, one for the farm team and one for a buyer. Live dashboards cover feed conversion, the breeding hub, health, milk, nutrition, daily operations and finance. Advanced reports are included in the Gold and Enterprise plans.

RFID and smart scale: speed and accuracy at scale

With thousands of head, typing numbers by hand means mistakes. A Bluetooth RFID reader reads the ear tag and fills in the animal's number, and the smart scale reads the tag and sends the weight straight into that animal's weight history. You get regular weights for the whole herd without a notebook, and a solid basis for fattening and selling decisions.

Investors and partners

Many large farms have more than one owner. The investors and partners module in Throf records each partner's ownership percentage and profit share, next to expenses, sales, cost per head and net profit. The monthly partner report becomes numbers from the system, not estimates. Read more on livestock investment with partners.

Get started

Download Throf from the App Store or Google Play, or open app.throf.com. There is a free plan for small herds and paid plans by herd size; see the pricing page. For a farm with thousands of head, contact the team to enable the web platform and import your Excel file.