Marking

The Marking tab is for recording your annual calf marking (branding) season — the total calves put through, the steer/heifer split, the ear tag colour for the year, and which paddock the mob was in. These records feed directly into the Marking report.

What marking is

In Australian cattle farming, "marking" or "calf marking" is the process of working through a mob of cows and calves to:

• Brand calves with a hot iron or paint brand
• Ear tag each calf with a NLIS (National Livestock Identification System) tag
• Castrate bull calves that will be raised as steers
• Ear mark with a distinctive notch pattern
• Vaccinate — often 5-in-1 or 7-in-1 at the same time

Marking is typically done at 2–4 months of age, while calves are still small enough to handle. It's one of the key dates in the cattle calendar and the point where you know exactly how many calves you've raised and what your steer/heifer ratio is.

Recording a marking season

The Marking tab lists every paddock that has a calving record for the year you pick, so mark calving complete in Calf Logging first.

1. Open the Marking tab and choose the Year.
2. For each paddock, enter the number of steers (🐂) and heifers (🐄) marked. Together they can't be more than the calves recorded for that paddock.
3. Enter the Date Marked. Once a paddock has a date its row locks, and its calves move into your weaner counts.
4. A calf born or found after you finished? Tap + Late Calf beside the paddock.
5. When every paddock is done, tick Marking Complete for Year.

The ear tag colour is filled in for you — see Ear tag colours below.

Ear tag colours

Ear tags change colour each year so you can tell a beast's birth year at a glance in the paddock. BlackCow works out the colour for you from an 8-year rotation:

The order is White, Yellow, Blue, Pink, Green, Red, Purple, Orange, then it starts again at White (2031 is White, 2032 is Yellow, and so on; the same pattern runs backwards for earlier years).

The colour for the selected year is shown at the top of the Marking tab as Ear Tag Colour, marked automatic. Tap How tag colours are chosen under it to see the current 8-year cycle.

If your tags are a different colour

1. Open the Marking tab and choose the year.
2. Beside Ear Tag Colour, open Change colour for … and pick the colour you actually used.
3. The line now reads set manually. The colour applies to that whole year and to every marking record already saved for it, and it shows in Reports → Marking.
4. To go back to the rotation, choose Automatic in the same list.

Marking record fields

Steer/heifer split calculation

BlackCow automatically calculates the steer/heifer split as a percentage from your totals. For example, if you mark 80 calves — 43 steers and 37 heifers — your split is 54% steers / 46% heifers.

Over time, this split is shown in the Marking report so you can see if your herd is running consistently or if there's an unusual season. A roughly 50/50 split is normal. A very skewed split (e.g. 65/35) might indicate a sampling issue or could simply be natural variation in a small mob.

How marking records feed into the report

The Reports → Marking tab uses your marking records to show:

• Total calves marked per year
• Steer and heifer totals and percentages by year
• Trend over time — is your calf crop growing, shrinking, or stable?

You can compare the total calves marked against your cows-at-marking to get a rough calving percentage (though the Calving report does this more precisely from your calving records).