Farm software that tells you what each animal cost to keep

The animal you sell took a year to make

A kid bought at 120,000 and sold eighteen months later at 320,000 looks like 200,000 earned. It is not. In between it ate, it was sprayed against ticks, it was dewormed twice, and somebody was paid to walk behind it every day.

Cattle widen the gap because the holding period is longer. A steer bought to fatten is money parked in an animal for a year, and the costs arrive in small weekly pieces — a bag of dairy meal, a jerrycan of acaricide, the herdsman's pay, a vet called out at night. All of it forgotten long before the animal reaches the market.

PesaScope records the spending as it happens and the sale when it happens. So when a buyer is standing in front of you, you already know the price below which the animal is not worth letting go.

How a livestock farm records the cycle

1. Record what you paid for the animalA steer, a heifer, a batch of kids — the price on the day you paid it. That figure is the floor everything else stacks on.
2. Record the weekly inputsFeed, salt, acaricide, drugs, the vet's call-out, the herdsman's wage. Each is an expense with a category, so a year of vet bills reads as one line instead of a memory.
3. Record the sale on the day it is agreedCash at the kraal or through a broker at the market, both are sales. If the buyer takes the animal now and pays after the market, record it as credit and the balance sits in Debtors.
4. Read the months before you restockRun the profit report across the months the batch was on the farm. Takings minus everything the herd cost is the number to weigh against buying more stock.

The list a livestock farm sets up

Pick "Goat & cattle farm" at sign-up and this list is already there, and you can add to it whenever you start keeping something new.

Feeds and inputs sit in the list so they can be recorded as purchases. The animals are what you sell.

One bull, fourteen months on the farm

At the market it feels like 1,300,000. Fourteen months of keeping turn it into 265,000 — and the herdsman cost this animal three times what the vet did.

What PesaScope will not do for you

There is no herd register. PesaScope holds no animal-level record — no ear tags, no dam and sire, no calving or kidding dates, no weight history. If you need that, keep a book or a dedicated herd app, because PesaScope will not replace it.

There are no health or vaccination records either. It will not tell you a shot is due or that a heifer is close to calving. What it holds is the 145,000 you paid the vet, in a category you chose, on a date you can find again.

That trade-off is deliberate. Farms rarely collapse for want of pedigree records. They collapse because nobody added up what the herd ate against what it sold.

Where a livestock farm loses money quietly

1. The broker's cut never reaches your handCommission taken at the market is money you earned and never touched, so it is rarely written down. Record it or every margin you read is too flattering.
2. Feed taken on credit at the agrovetTwo bags now, settle at month end. Recorded as a creditor, you can see what the herd owes before the sale money is already spent.
3. Animals that leave without money coming inA slaughter for a function, a gift to a relative, one lost to disease. Each still ate a year of feed. Unrecorded, the herd simply looks less profitable for no reason you can name.
4. The herdsman's pay, in cash and in kindWeekly, sometimes partly in food or a goat, almost never written down. Usually the second-biggest cost after feed.

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