The Winter Lick, Classification and Handling

#The abattoir writes you a report card, in brown ink

Somewhere on a carcass hanging in a Gauteng abattoir there is a number stamped in brown ink, at the exact spot on the animal where the injury happened. It is a damage code, it runs from 1 to 3, and it is attributed to four things: rough handling, overloading, horns and incorrect injection technique (SAMIC).

That is not a welfare abstraction. It is a mark on your carcass, at your loading ramp's fault, and it comes off your cheque. The abattoir is telling you what your handling facility is like, and charging you for the report.

This lesson covers the two places where money leaves a cattle enterprise quietly: the winter feed bill, which dominates the variable costs of a veld cow herd, and the classification stamp, which is the last price signal you receive and the only one you cannot argue with.

#The winter bill, on forty cows

Module 6 established the targets. Here they are with a herd attached.

Take 40 dry pregnant cows on Highveld sourveld. The published seasonal guidance — manufacturer and provincial extension material, so corroborate it against your own veld analysis and a registered nutritionist — sets targets at the level of class and intake (Voermol; NW DARD; Feedtek):

Work the winter window. April to August is about 153 days. Forty cows at a mid-range 500 g/head/day is 20 kg a day, which is 3 060 kg over the season — roughly 61 fifty-kilogram bags. That is the number to take to the co-op, and it is also the number to check your actual consumption against: bags issued, divided by head, divided by days on the camp. If you are not measuring intake you are not running a lick programme, you are buying bags.

Two settings do most of the work. Salt is the intake tap — roughly 40% of the supplement on sourveld, where cattle over-consume, against 10–25% on sweetveld, where they under-consume. And start the winter protein lick before condition is lost, not after, because by the time the herd looks thin the intake spiral has been running for weeks and you are now paying to recover ground rather than hold it.

#What the stamp actually says

South Africa classifies carcasses under the Agricultural Product Standards Act 119 of 1990 and its regulations. Be careful with the notice: SAMIC states the system operates under "R55 as amended" and has been in use since June 1992, while the academic literature more often cites GN R342 of 19 March 1999. The Act number and year are certain; which notice is currently in force is not, so cite the Act and check the notice with SAMIC before printing it.

The codes themselves are confirmed (SAMIC).

Age, read from permanent incisors — this is the one that catches veld finishers:

Fatness runs 0 to 6, assessed visually, marked with repeated numerals — 111, 222 and so on. Zero is no fat and 6 is excessively over-fat; 2 to 3 is the market target, and 0 to 1 signals an underfed animal that will be penalised. Note that no source gives fat-code thickness bands in millimetres — both SAMIC and the trade press describe visual assessment. If someone hands you millimetre bands, ask where they came from.

Conformation runs 1 to 5: 1 very flat, 3 medium at roughly 50% meat yield and the practical target, 5 very round.

Damage runs 1 to 3, stamped in brown ink at the site of the injury.

Uncastrated bulls are marked "MD" in black, on AB, B and C carcasses only, and attract a discount for darker colour and eating quality.

Lesson 2 showed the other half of that argument: Du Plessis and Hoffman found shear force measurably higher at 30 months than at 18, so the age proxy is not baseless — but neither is the criticism that the grid contains no incentive for the quantity of saleable meat, since the conformation score already exists and is not priced.

#Damage is a handling report card

Now go back to the brown ink. Every damage code is a bruise, and every bruise happened before the animal reached the stunning box — in your crush, on your ramp, in your truck, or from a horn.

The design principles that prevent them are international, and the dimensions are for North American frames, but the behavioural logic transfers directly (Grandin):

• Curved race, solid sides — the animal cannot see what is at the end and cannot see the handler.
• Never fill a forcing pen more than half. An overfull pen is where the bruising happens.
• Non-slip, visually uniform flooring. A slip is a fall, and a fall is a damage code.
• No shadows, no sudden contrasts at the entry. Cattle balk at a change in the floor, not at the crush.

And carry Lesson 1's number with you: excited cattle take 20 to 30 minutes for heart rate to return to normal after seconds of agitation. The shouting saves ninety seconds at the gate and costs half an hour of settled animals, plus whatever the brown ink says later.

#The crush is your compliance point

There is a reason this course keeps coming back to a set of steel rails.

Everything the law requires you to do to a cow happens in the crush. Branding with your registered mark under the Animal Identification Act 6 of 2002. Pregnancy diagnosis after bull removal, from Lesson 3. The bull's breeding soundness examination. Dipping. State-veterinary inspection and any FMD-related movement check. A farm that cannot handle its cattle calmly cannot do a single one of the things this module recommends — and will do all of them badly, roughly, and late.

Do two things this week. Weigh what your lick programme actually delivered per head per day last winter, against the 400–600 g target. And phone your abattoir and ask for the classification sheet on your last consignment — age class, fat code, conformation and damage codes. One of those numbers tells you about your veld. The other tells you about your ramp. Almost no farmer has ever looked at either.