Livestock traceability usually gets discussed in terms of the animal: where it came from, what it was treated with, where it went. Output traceability, tracking eggs, milk, honey, or meat from the moment they're harvested through to the moment they're sold, gets far less attention, despite being just as important to both cost accuracy and customer trust.
The reason it matters starts with cost. Output that isn't costed at the point of harvest tends to get costed later, often with a generic average that has little relationship to what that specific batch actually cost to produce. Over time, this quietly erodes the accuracy of batch-level profitability: two batches with very different feed costs and mortality can end up looking identical on paper, simply because their output was never individually costed.
The second reason is operational: a single day's harvest rarely stays together all the way to sale. It gets combined with other harvests in storage, split across multiple deliveries, sold in batches that don't map neatly back to a single day or a single batch. Without a system that tracks inventory at the lot level, quantity-weighted-back to its source, answering "which batch did this shipment come from" becomes a reconstruction exercise rather than a lookup.
The third reason is trust. Buyers, particularly commercial and institutional ones, increasingly expect a documented chain from production to delivery. Being able to produce that chain instantly, rather than after several days of searching through paper records or disconnected spreadsheets, is itself a competitive advantage, independent of the underlying product quality.
The technical requirement underneath all of this is a FIFO-style cost layer: each unit of output inventory needs to remember where it came from, at what cost, so that consumption, whether a sale, a transfer, or wastage, can always be attributed back to its origin. This is a data-modeling decision made once, at the point output is received into inventory, not something that can be bolted on retroactively once a customer asks a question you can't answer.