Note: this blog post was originally posted on lambtracker.com and has been moved here for preservation. Some information may be outdated.
The LambTracker® Lambing module encountered live sheep for the first time today. We had two sets of twins! We did uncover a few workflow issues. It’s important to get all tags ready and enter everything but the weight in LambTracker® before you actually tag the lambs or weigh them, due to going back and forth with the screens. Lamb slime is not good for touch screens. Neither is snow melting and falling on it, causing erroneous key presses.
In spite of those issues, the program worked well. All four lambs born so far today were processed properly. We uncovered three issues that need work:
- LookUpSheep only looks up the first sheep with a given tag. This is fine for ear tags that are not duplicated, but it’s a problem for paint brands that we put on lambs and ewes at birth.
- I didn’t get the Lambing History edits finished, so for now, adding details to the births is being done by hand on my Mac directly into the database.
- Related to the above, I didn’t finish adding paint brands to the ewe record section. I’m also adding those by hand.
These items are not really bugs, but more functions that haven’t been written or finished yet.
We’re having snowstorms, but we have a number of ewes looking to pop in the next 24 hours, so LambTracker® is likely to get a workout!