California Net Energy: Weights That Follow the Bunk

FLS Cloud now projects weight with California Net Energy — daily gain calculated from the intake you actually delivered, the energy in the ration you actually fed, and the animal actually standing in the pen.

Every yard has had this conversation. You set a lot up on ADG, you pick a factor that felt right at induction, and for the next hundred and forty days that number keeps doing its thing — rain or shine, hot ration or clean-up ration, full bunk or a day the loads never went out.

Then something changes. You step the pen up. You pull them back. Weather takes intake down for a week. The cattle respond, but the projected weight doesn't — because the projection was never looking at the bunk in the first place. It was looking at a number somebody typed in months ago.

DMC helps, but it's still one ratio applied flat across the feeding period. Neither method knows that a 1,100-pound steer burns most of a maintenance ration before an ounce goes to gain — and that the same feed on a 600-pound calf does something completely different.

FLS Cloud now runs the actual energy math.

Turn it on, one lot at a time

1. Set the lot's weight method to California Net Energy. On Add Lot or Edit Lot, pick CNE from the same dropdown you use today for ADG and DMC.
2. Set a Gain Factor between 0 and 10. Five is neutral — the formula runs exactly as published. Every point above or below moves the projected gain by 5%, so a 6 gives you +5% and a 4 gives you −5%. That's your dial for cattle that consistently beat the book, or don't, on your yard.
3. Feed like you always have. There's no new screen and no extra step. Every pen feeding you save recalculates that pen's day and rolls the result into each animal's weight.

That's the whole workflow. Pen and lot weights, load sheets, and feed calls pick it up from there.

What's actually behind the number

CNE is the net energy system published by the National Research Council — the Lofgreen and Garrett equations that beef nutritionists have used for decades — wired straight into your feeding records. 

Each day's gain comes out of four real inputs:

• Dry matter intake — what that pen actually ate that day, per head
• Ration energy — the NEm and NEg of what you fed, blended by dry matter when you fed more than one
• Body weight — maintenance comes off the top first, and it scales with the size of the animal
• Sex — steers and heifers run on their own gain coefficients

Feed a hotter ration and the projected gain goes up. Miss a feeding and that day contributes nothing. The weight curve follows the bunk sheet.

The details it handles for you

This is where a hand-built energy spreadsheet usually falls apart:

• Mixed pens are run animal by animal. Steers and heifers together, or cattle inducted three hundred pounds apart — each one gets the formula on its own weight and sex, not on a pen average.
• Two feedings in a day count as one day. The rations are blended by dry matter share, and the day's intake is divided by the head recorded on each feeding, not by the number of feedings.
• Backdated corrections flow forward. Fix an amount from last Tuesday and that whole day is recomputed, with the difference carried straight through to today's weight.
• A scale weight always wins. Record a weigh-up and that weight becomes the new anchor; CNE projects forward from there. Your hard number is never overwritten by a calculated one.
• No drifting upward on air. The projection never runs past the last recorded feeding date. If the pen hasn't been fed, the weight doesn't move.
• The Update Weight screen follows the lot. It shows Current and New for whichever method that lot is on — ADG, DMC, or CNE — instead of a column of "N/A".

Set it up once

CNE only works if the energy values are there:

• Your components need NEm and NEg greater than zero, entered in Mcal/cwt
• Your animal types need the correct sex, since that selects the gain coefficients

To keep that data honest, there's a new switch under Settings → Feed → California Net Energy: reject saving feeds when a ration component has NEm or NEg at zero. It only ever applies to CNE lots, and it ships turned off — no ADG or DMC yard gets asked for numbers it doesn't track.

Already on ADG or DMC? Nothing changes.

CNE is opt-in, lot by lot. If you never select it, your feeding screens behave exactly as they did yesterday — same speed, same numbers. And if you're coming off the legacy FLS desktop application, the CNE weights have been validated head-to-head against it, so your history carries over without a surprise.

Available now

California Net Energy is live in FLS Cloud. Open a lot, switch the weight method, and let the bunk do the math. If you'd like a hand getting NEm and NEg onto your components first, get in touch — it's a short conversation and then your weights start telling you something new.

Talk to us about setup →

Questions? Reach the team at support@feedlotsolutions.com

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Not using FLS Cloud yet? Feedlot Solutions provides the most comprehensive, cloud-based management software for the modern beef producer. From inventory and health records to precise feed billing and custom reporting, we help you measure it so you can manage it.

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