QuickFlux brings individual metabolic efficiency measurement out of the research barn and into the herd
An average is a place for animals to hide. Poor performers get disguised as average, while your best performers are pulled down to the same number. Without individual animal data, you are managing the average instead of making decisions based on the animals actually driving, or limiting, your herd’s performance.
QuickFlux separates them. Three to five minutes per animal, in the chute or headlock you already own, and every head in the group comes out with an individual score showing exactly where it ranks. The average stops being the only number you have. Keep the animals that pay. Cull the ones that don’t. Breed from the top of the list instead of the middle of it.
That variation is real, and it is large. Two steers standing side by side, under the same management, can differ substantially in how much feed they convert into gain. Two cows in the same string, milking the same, can differ in how much feed it takes to get there. Everyone in this business knows that. The problem has never been believing it – the problem has been proving it, animal by animal, at a scale and a price that makes the answer useful.
Until now, proving it meant a feed intake trial. Individual intake systems, purpose-built pens, animals pulled out of their normal environment, and weeks to months of data collection before a single ranking comes out the other side. The data is excellent. The data is also expensive, slow, and limited to the number of head that will fit in the facility. Research programs run these trials on dozens or hundreds of animals. Commercial operations, for the most part, do not run them at all.
That is the gap QuickFlux was built to close.
What is QuickFlux?
QuickFlux is a portable measurement system that determines an individual animal’s metabolic efficiency in three to five minutes, using the handling facilities you already own.
The unit travels to the animal. It works in the chute for beef and the headlock for dairy, using the restraint and the routine you already have in place. Animals walk up and get measured the first time they see it – no acclimation, no attractant, no change to how the group is handled. When the pen is done, the unit moves to the next pen, the next barn, or the next operation.
Each animal comes out of that measurement with a Metabolic Efficiency Index (MEI) score. The MEI ranks that animal against the rest of the group on how efficiently it is converting feed into product. Not an estimate from frame score. Not an inference from pedigree. A direct measurement of that specific animal’s metabolism, taken on your operation, in the time it takes to work it through the chute.
Work a pen in a day. Work a string in a morning. Get a ranked list of your herd, top to bottom.
What ‘metabolic efficiency’ actually means
Here is the science, in plain terms.
An animal’s metabolism is a conversion process. Feed goes in; energy comes out and gets partitioned into maintenance, growth, milk, and reproduction. Some of that energy is lost along the way. The efficiency of that conversion – how much of the feed an animal eats actually ends up as product rather than loss – is what separates a profitable animal from an expensive one.
That conversion process leaves a measurable signature. As an animal metabolises feed, it produces metabolic gases at rates that reflect what its body is doing with that energy. Carbon dioxide output, in particular, is a well-established proxy for metabolic heat production and energy expenditure. Measure the flux of those gases accurately enough, and you can characterise how that animal is running.
QuickFlux uses the same mass-flux methodology that has underpinned C-Lock’s measurement systems for over a decade and produced peer-reviewed data in a body of published research now nearing the thousands of studies worldwide. A collector positioned on the animal’s muzzle captures the full gas flux; airflow is measured continuously; concentrations are analysed in real time. The result is a quantified measurement of that animal’s metabolic output – and from it, the MEI.
The methodology is not new or unvalidated. What is new is the form factor, the speed, and the removal of every barrier that used to keep this measurement locked inside research facilities.
The timeline is the breakthrough. Ranking a group used to mean a 60-day feed efficiency trial – animals committed to a facility for two months before the first usable number came out the other side. QuickFlux gets you to a ranked group in minutes of measurement per animal. Animals stay in their production setting, the operation keeps running, and the answer arrives on a timeline that fits the decisions it is meant to inform. More measurement time per animal tightens the picture further, and for high-stakes decisions like sire selection it is worth taking – but the working baseline is measured in minutes, not months, and that is what puts whole-herd screening within reach for the first time.
What this means if you run cattle
Ranking is where your extra profit is hiding.
But the ranking is only the organising tool. What you actually get back is an individual number for every animal you run through – a measured MEI value tied to that ear tag, not a place in line. That distinction matters. A ranked list tells you who your best animal is; the individual values tell you whether your best animal is any good. If the whole group scores low, the top of your list is still a problem, and you need to know that before you keep replacements out of it.
Individual values are also what let you compare across groups and across time. This year’s heifers against last year’s. Your herd against the contemporary groups around you. The same animal before and after a ration change. A rank is only meaningful inside the group it came from — a measured value travels.
That’s the information behind every decision on the list below.
Culling. Bottom-decile animals eat like everyone else and return less. Identifying them is the fastest payback on the list, and MEI gives you a number to put next to the cow instead of a hunch.
Replacement selection. Keeping heifers out of your most efficient cows compounds. Measure the dams, keep from the top, and the herd average moves in the direction you want it to without a single change to your ration.
Sire and bull selection. Feed efficiency is heritable. Bull studs and seedstock operations have wanted whole-contemporary-group efficiency data for years and have been limited by intake trial capacity. QuickFlux measures the whole group.
Feedlot sorting. Efficiency ranking on arrival opens the door to sorting and managing pens by how animals actually perform rather than by weight alone.
Ration and management validation. Measure a group, change something, measure again. The animals tell you whether the change worked.
None of this requires you to change how you handle cattle. If you can run them through a chute or lock them up at the bunk, you can measure them.
What this means if you run research
For the research community, the constraint has never been methodology – it has been n.
Individual intake facilities are finite, often expensive, and usually booked up. Study designs get built around how many animals the facility can hold and how many weeks the funding covers. Statistical power gets negotiated downward. Whole categories of questions – genotype-by-environment interaction, breed comparisons across regions, commercial-scale phenotyping for genomic prediction – have been difficult to answer at the sample sizes they actually require.
QuickFlux changes the throughput math. Measurement time per animal drops from weeks to minutes. Facility requirements drop to whatever handling equipment the cooperating operation already has. That means:
- Population-scale phenotyping. Thousands of animals across multiple herds, breeds, and geographies, measured under commercial conditions rather than trial conditions.
- Genomic reference populations. Feed efficiency phenotypes at the volume genomic prediction models need to become accurate.
- On-farm gas flux data. Metabolic gas measurement – including methane flux for programs that require it – collected in the animal’s actual production environment, not a metabolism barn.
- Field validation and extension. Take the measurement to the herd instead of bringing the herd to the measurement.
QuickFlux is not a replacement for high-resolution, long-duration intake and emissions work. It is a screening and phenotyping instrument that operates at a scale that work cannot reach. Used together, they are complementary: GreenFeed for deeper insights, QuickFlux for a wider measurement group.
Why we are launching it now
C-Lock has spent more than fifteen years building measurement systems that researchers trust. That trust was earned in a specific setting – instrumented facilities, trained personnel, structured protocols.
The demand we kept hearing was that producers wanted those same answers without the trial. Researchers wanted the sample size without the facility. Genetics companies wanted contemporary-group data without waiting three seasons for the pens to clear. Every one of those conversations came back to the same constraint: the measurement was sound, but it could not travel, and it could not scale.
QuickFlux is the answer to that constraint. It takes the measurement methodology that already has scientific credibility and puts it in a portable package that works in the barn, the chute, and the yard – measuring more animals, faster, in more places than has ever been practical.
We built it because ranking animals on efficiency should not be a research privilege. It should be something you can do on a Tuesday.
Where it stands
QuickFlux is validated for cattle – beef and dairy – with small ruminant capability in development. It measures individual animals with individual ID in three to five minutes per head, using the restraint you already own, and two passes are enough to rank the group. It travels between pens, barns, and operations as easily as it sets up in the first one.
Ready to see what your herd actually looks like?
Contact C-Lock Inc. to learn more about this technology and how it can be implemented.
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Please Note: This is a Commercial Profile
Please note, this article will also appear in the 28th edition of our quarterly publication.
