Per-Head Additives: Feed It by the Head, Not the Percentage

4 minute read

A mineral premix isn't part of your mix the way corn is. Corn is a percentage — 62% of whatever goes in the truck. The premix is 30 grams a head, every head, every day, and it doesn't care how big the load is.

So you've been faking it. You back into a percentage that comes out about right for a typical load, and then you watch it drift: a light load underfeeds, a heavy one overfeeds, and a pen that gets fed twice gets it twice. Per-Head Additives stops the guessing. You enter the rate you actually want per head, and FLS works out the pounds.

Where to find it

Add Ration and Edit Ration, on the desktop and on the phone. Every component row now has a Unit column next to Inclusion. Leave it on % and nothing changes. Switch it to lbs per head and that row becomes an additive.

That's the whole switch. There's no separate screen and nothing to turn on.

Setting one up

1. Add the component row and pick your ingredient.
2. Change Unit to lbs per head (kgs per head if you're on metric).
3. Type the rate — pounds per head, not a percentage.

The Inclusion box clears itself when you flip the unit. That's deliberate. 25% and 25 lbs a head are not the same number, and a value carried across would look perfectly normal on screen while feeding an additive at a rate nobody chose.

Your percentage rows still have to total 100%. Additives sit outside that total — a ration of 100% forage plus 1 lb a head of supplement is balanced, not 101% over. The badge at the top of the grid says so.

On the load sheet: one pen, one day's worth

Here's the part worth reading twice.

An additive is per head, so the amount on a load sheet is head count × rate. Pen 11 has 95 head on a 1 lb/hd supplement, so Pen 11 gets 95 lbs. Simple enough — until Pen 11 is on two load sheets the same day.

It still gets 95 lbs. Not 190.

FLS splits the pen's daily amount across the sheets in proportion to what each one is delivering. If sheet A is taking 1,200 lbs to that pen and sheet B is taking 1,000, sheet A carries 51.8 lbs of supplement and sheet B carries 43.2. They add to 95. Split the load three ways, or clone a sheet, or add a pen after the fact — the pen's total for the day doesn't move.

Anything already posted comes off the top first. If sheet A has been delivered and posted with its 51.8 lbs, the sheets still waiting split the remaining 43.2 between them. What's fed is fed.

One more piece of bookkeeping we handle quietly: if a pen is also on a ration that carries the same ingredient as a percentage, that sheet isn't part of the split. It's not feeding per head, so it neither takes a share nor counts against the total.

Everywhere else you feed

Add Feed, the Feed Importer, and the Daily/Monthly Feed Sheet each carry the full per-head rate — no splitting, because there's nothing to split across. Enter two feedings for a pen in a day and it gets the rate twice, which is almost always what you meant.

What it costs

The Unit Cost column prices percentage rows per ton, the way it always has. Additive rows are priced per head instead — $0.12 /hd — because that's the number you can actually compare against a bid.

The ration form also carries Additive Cost and Additive Price as a flat daily per-head charge, kept out of the per-ton figures above them so neither number is double-counted.

What to watch for

• Rounding doesn't apply to additives. Your load rounding increment still rounds the percentage components. An additive is a rate, not a quantity you round to the nearest 10 lbs, so it comes through exact.
• A rate above 1 lb per head asks you to confirm. Most additives are ounces or grams. If you meant it, click through — better than finding out at the bunk.
• A ration can't be nothing but additives. Something has to carry the 100%.
• An additive with no rate won't save. A blank rate is almost always a half-finished row.
• Negative feeds can't reverse a ration with an additive. Delete the original record from the Pen Feed list instead — that reverses exactly what was recorded, which a negative feed can't do.
• On CNE: an additive's own energy isn't included in the CNE gain calculation. For a true micro ingredient that's fine. If it carries real energy — a supplement or fat — check calculated gains against scale weights. FLS raises this the first time you set one up on a CNE feedlot.

It's live

Per-Head Additives is in FLS Cloud now, on desktop and mobile, at no extra cost. If you already have ingredients you've been approximating as a percentage, converting them takes about a minute per ration.