As the title says, farming doesn’t stop for the holidays. We just celebrated July 4th here at AnimalTrakker® and at the Desert Weyr farm. While we had time to go view our local parade and support some of our local businesses for the holiday, we attribute that availability to how AnimalTrakker® helps us.
Part of why AnimalTrakker® focuses on in-field data collection is for speed and accuracy. It’s a whole lot faster to collect data in the field while you’re actually looking at your animals. Then, your desktop computer can handle reporting on it later. Anytime you collect data on paper instead, you have to transcribe it into your computer, then send registrations, configure reporting, and handle the other tasks you need to do.
Not to mention that transcribing can be a source of errors. It’s easy to transpose numbers in the process. Plus, if you’re not using EID, determining (and correctly recording) the correct ID number for your animals can be a huge pain. The whole reason we developed AnimalTrakker® was to avoid those problems. We wanted to eliminate the potential for errors in data entry from fieldwork.
Because of that, the primary focus of Farm Mobile will always be data collection, while the primary focus of Farm Desktop will always be generating useful data reports. We do plan to add features that will allow you to add an animal’s history in later, but in general, our goal is to empower you to collect accurate data at the source, then pass that data to your desktop for reporting.
Voice recording of in-field observations can be helpful as well. It has limited usefulness with numbers, but for things like thoughts, observations, things to check or remember later, or just stream-of-consciousness recording, it can come in handy. The problem is that you still need to accurately interpret or transcribe your notes later – a problem that Farm Mobile eliminates.
We just had a case where in-field data collection reached critical importance. One morning while we were feeding the sheep, one of the ram lambs wouldn’t come down to get food. Of course, we went up to check who it was and assess his condition. Upon taking a closer look, it was clear that he needed some assistance. It looked like he might have some nose bots, and we couldn’t tell what his temperature was. We ran back to the house, grabbed the AnimalTrakker® tablet, our EID reader, a spray marker, some dewormer, and some other useful things in our field tote bag.
We went back up with our things, checked the ram lamb over, and we looked at his history and genetics to see if it’d be better to treat him aggressively or minimally. We were able to give him his dewormer and document it right there, and even added a few notes for things we saw in the process. After the fact, we didn’t have to go back in and transcribe everything – it was already recorded in our AnimalTrakker® database for future reference. That’s the beauty of in-field data collection!
Not only does AnimalTrakker® help us collect clearer, more accurate data, but it does so in a format that’s easy to report on, and it saves us time, too. As farmers and ranchers, we don’t get days off – but AnimalTrakker® at least helps us maximize our efficiency. That means more time for parades, for supporting local business, for nights at the bar with friends, for re-investing time and energy in our own businesses, and for all the other things we value.
