This month's update is all about expanding your herds and growing your business!
- You'll see new improvements to to the livestock breeding and birthing process to better account for surrogates and multiple births in a litter.
- You will also find similar improvements when adding multiple newly purchased animals to the software, which you can now also accomplish in offline scout mode on the Farmbrite mobile app.
- There are also some enhancements and new fields on your plantings, and a new way to calculate inventory usage.
You'll see new options for surrogate breeding when creating breeding records using the embryo transfer method. You can use these to track the genetic mother and father of the embryo. Even if those animals are off farm, you can still track them in Farmbrite using the "reference" status to have the new offspring inherit their correct genealogy. Along with this, you'll also have a new Breeding Surrogate report to track the performance and history of your surrogate animals.
No matter what breeding method is used, when you record the birth of new offspring, you'll have an easier time creating twins, triplets, and more. You can now add unique information about each offspring as you record the birth. Data like name, sex, birth weight, coloring, and tag numbers can be supplied separately for each new animal in the birth, eliminating the need to update the individuals animals in the litter. Along with this, you'll also see a new birthing ease field which can record how easy or difficult the birth was, and help you make informed breeding decisions in the future. This field has also been added to the your Reproduction Details report for easy access. Finally, you'll also see the breeding tab is now displayed on male animal records to help you track the times they have been used as a sire.
This same new process is now also available when adding new animals to Farmbrite. If you purchase multiple animals at once, and want to add all of their basic information, you can use the Bulk Add tool to create them all at once. Like the birthing update, you can add name, sex, weight, coloring, and tag information for up to 15 animals at a time. Also, you can now use this same new process in scout mode when using the Farmbrite mobile app offline! This is something we've heard from many users, and we think it should help you add animals when you scanning and logging them from an offsite delivery.
Hot Tip: Did you know you can access a data sheet containing all of the information for a single animal? This had previously been available on livestock records under the feature to Print Record, but we've renamed the feature to View Datasheet as you can do more than just print it! This gives you a single page of treatments, feedings, genealogy, grazing moves, and a lot more for a single animal. Perfect if you are selling livestock and want to provide the buyer with a full animal history.
Beyond the livestock breeding improvements, you'll also find updates to other areas of Farmbrite.
You can now exclude inventory usage from average usage calculations when removing items from your inventory. We've heard requests for a way to handle transfers, gifts, and sold items, and have created a new selection to prevent these from being counted towards your average daily usage. Perhaps our neighbor ran out of feed, and we gave them some of ours to help them out. We probably don't want that gift counted in our usage, as it may throw off the number we use to determine how much we fed our own animals each day. You can now check a box to "Exclude from usage calculations" when removing the item from inventory to accomplish this.
In the plantings section, you'll now see a new field to estimate an average plant height on your crop type records. You can add this for any of your existing crops, and it will be preloaded for new crops you add from the Farmbrite crop catalog. Additionally, you'll have a better experience with viewing your crop plan, as the column title header row is now locked at the top as you scroll through the page.
Have any questions about these new features? Reach out to us and we'll be glad to help!