Just finished a major change to the database structure. We’ve always had a few static concepts in the system. Alerts are things that you want to check next time you work on the sheep. Notes are things that stay with the sheep record for life, but don’t really fit into any other table. Evaluations are ranking, scoring, and measuring tests for the sheep.

Last week, we had the first field trial of the shearing and sheep management modules. We learned several things that we’ll incorporate into LambTracker® now.

We’ve been very busy with LambTracker® development and use. After the ewes were inseminated, we waited a bit, then started doing ultrasounds. We have a relatively inexpensive ultrasound machine, but we’re not skilled in determining pregnancy yet.

We’ve just finished the major portion of this year’s USDA experiment on non-surgical AI in sheep. On December 3rd, we inseminated 24 ewes with either fresh-cooled or frozen semen. During the run-up to the insemination date, we used LambTracker and a new module, EvaluateSheep2, to collect the date and time when each ewe had her sponge or CIDR inserted, the PMSG given, and the removal date of the sponge or CIDR.

We’ve been using LambTracker® to do some of our major sorting and evaluation tasks with the sheep.

As a participating flock in USDA research on artificial insemination in sheep, we are in the middle of setting up for this year’s experiment.

Today, we put EID tags into all of the current and potential breeding ewes. We tagged 69 ewes in 1.5 hours using the LambTracker® ConvertToEID module. We also took notes on several sheep, and we decided not to put tags on the sheep scheduled for the butcher soon.
Everything in the LambTracker® program worked properly.

During our first test against live sheep today, we had no program crashes. The database was properly updated. Old farm tags that we had to remove from sheep ears were successfully marked as removed. New EID tags got added to the database with a tag_date_on of today, then were attached to the correct sheep.

The ConvertToEID module is now ready for testing against live sheep! The ConvertToEID module is a task in the program that provides a screen to look up a sheep, add and remove federal and farm tags, and scan and add EID tags. We’re ready to test it by adding EID tags to all of our breeding rams – hopefully this week.