We just finished our sheep experiment week. We are working with the USDA on developing non-surgical AI procedures for sheep. Last year, we successfully used LambTracker to collect a ton of data during the week on insemination depths, estrus characteristics, etc.

I have been doing further work on the chromeos-apk system for running an Android program within the Chrome browser. It appears to be working well enough, and it’s getting better all the time. At this point, that is my focus for making the desktop part of LambTracker®.

I was pleased to be able to present information on record keeping for rare breeds at the annual Livestock Conservancy meeting that was held in Austin, Texas, this past week. As promised, here is the full presentation I gave, as well as additional material at the end that I did not present.

Here’s a link to the PDF of the partial handout for my presentation at the Livestock Conservancy meeting in November.

Moving forward, we’re looking at using the Android program as a desktop version. Our current task is to develop several new activities that will be used to test the desktop.

Now that all of our existing sheep and our 2014 lambs’ data is in LambTracker®, I’ve started seriously working to migrate our 16-year flock history into the database. I’ve discovered a number of issues along the way.

I’ve been going round and round on several options for the LambTracker® Desktop app. Initial choices include Swing and Java FX. I had just about settled on Swing because I really don’t want to keep supporting Oracle. Then, there was using Cards or not as a structure.

We’re about to start our major sheep evaluation cycle. I’ve added most of the NSIP EBV data points into the database. Now I’m writing the queries to display the data along with the most recent evaluation.