Most ranchers know surprisingly little about what their cattle weigh on any given day. Weight is one of the most important numbers for the operation. It drives treatment decisions, sale timing, stocking rates, and performance tracking.

The problem is measuring it.

Getting a weight usually means a gather, a chute, labor, shrink, and a day spent moving cattle instead of doing something else. That’s why a presentation from a PhD student at Southern Australia Livestock Research Council’s Livestock 2026 conference in Wagga, Wagga, Australia caught our attention.

Wenfeng Jia, a PhD student at Charles Stuart University presented a system that estimates cattle weight using nothing more than three ordinary cameras and a computer. In university trials on 103 cattle, the system estimated live weight with an average error of 9.2 kilograms, or about 20 pounds (Farm Weekly).

That’s not commercial scale, or even on-farm yet. But it raises an interesting question: What if the best weight scale on a ranch is a camera?

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