Livestock

This is the Farmbrite help center Livestock category page. Use the areas below to navigate to an area of interest.

Records

Learn how to create, import, and update your livestock records here. These records can contains many different types of information about an animals including their basic details, past treatments, feeding history, genealogy, and accounting. You can connect these records to tasks and events to be sure you work with the right animals when completing work around your farm. You can also take notes on records, and create custom fields to track whatever data you need for the animal. Livestock records are generally for indivdiual animals, but you can also create Livestock Set Groups to track multiple animals together as one, like a flock of chickens or school of fish.

Groups

Every animal is an individual with unique needs, but Farmbrite knows that it is usually easier to work with multiple animals together as a herd or group. Specifically, we want to save you time - its quicker to move a herd of animals into a different grazing field with one action than it is to move them individually. This "bulk change" concept can be used when applying treatments, changing breeding statuses, adding notes, and much more. Creating a group also allows you to associate Tasks and Activities to it, so you can more easily assign work that is specific to a group of animals to your workers. You can even create groups to work with animals you might not normally keep track of as individuals - perhaps a colony of bees or a brood of chicks.

Breeding

Keeping detailed records of your livestock reproduction is critical to promoting the health and wellness of your herd. You'll likely want to track lineage and pedigree, as well as dates and methods used. This data is valuable to chart trends and outcomes to improve your ranch operations and increase productivity. Its easy to track all of this in Farmbrite. In the articles linked below, you'll learn how to create breeding records to have a history of which animal were bred, and when. You can perform pregnancy checks on them, and then record births as well. Those offspring will inherit the genealogy of the parents, so you can connect that history and find out what animals are most performant. Check out the articles below to learn more.

Health and Wellness

Take care of your animals with feedings, measurements, inputs, and treatments. You'll find articles below to learn how to take measurements, including physical characteristics like height, weight, and more. Beyond that though, you'll have animal wellness statistics and environmental cleanliness data points to record, which are used to determine an Animal Wellness score to easily see the current health of your animals. You'll also see how to feed your livestock using inventory from your farm resources, which an also automatically calculate a food conversation ratio when paired with animal weight measurements. Beyond that, you'll find articles that show you how to use Inputs to track what you're giving to your animals beyond food and medicine. Finally, there is also an article about tracking Withdrawal dates so you'll know when the required wait time has expired when giving your animals treatments. Check out the articles below to learn more.

Grazing

Grazing your animals in different locations around your farm is critical to both animal and soil health. You'll want to make sure that the animals can forage enough food, but also keep the needs of the land in mind as well. Farmbrite's grazing feature starts with you setting up your grazing locations and animal enclosures, and at the same time defining how long a grazing location should be rested until it is grazed again. You can divide your grazing locations on the Farm Map to help you get a visual representation of the land, and you'll also see your herds with their animal counts on the map as well. Farmbrite will use the weights of your animals to determine animal units grazing and then calculate an animal-days per acre figure for you too. The software will also show you a simple red/yellow/green visual queue so you can easily determine if a field is ready to be grazed again. You can move your animals in groups or individually, and full history of animal moves across your land is retained on their records. And when they are not grazing in a field, you can set up animal enclosures for paddocks and stalls to know exactly where your animals are. You'll also have grazing reports to reference past moves and current locations.

Yields

Yielding from your animal is the culmination of weeks or years of hard work. You've put so much effort into treatments, feedings, and inputs, and took measurements to track growth over time. You've probably brought by a vet or two, and maybe even loaded up your animals and brought them to different grazing fields or a stock show. That's a lot of work, and now it pays off with your yields. These yields might be recurring things like eggs from chickens, honey from bees, or milk from cows. Or you might be butchering your animals for meat as well. No matter how you are measuring the Yield, you can record how much you yielded and when it happened, and then store it in your inventory for traceability. You can then sell that yield as products in your online market, and trace it back to the animal it came from. You can even grade the yield and record separate amounts for different grades as well. And if the grading is not enough, you can track whatever you need by creating custom fields on your animal yields too. You'll also find a few different reports to track these yields by month and day, and formulas and calculations to help you determine average yield rates.

Accounting

No matter what type of livestock you are managing with Farmbrite, you'll probably want to know what you're spending on expenses and how much income you're bringing back in. From sets of chickens to smart groups of goats or cows, your animals consume things that cost you money and hopefully provide income for you as well. Maybe you want to track the cost of food, but a lot goes into your animals beyond that. How about tracking your treatments, medications, and vaccinations? You might also need to track bedding supplies and enrichment items. If you sell your animals, or the yields from them, you may want to track that too. You'll want to record transactions on each side of that ledger, and have them automatically totaled to calculate that profit or loss. Farmbrite can take those ledger transactions and generate reports that specifically correlate with the IRS Schedule F Tax Form 1040 categories by default, or you can customize your own chart of accounts for the categories that work for your livestock business. You'll also find charts and graphs on your Accounting Dashboard to help you track your accounting throughout the year at a glance.

Reporting

You can run standard and custom reports to get the data you need to see past performance and make future decisions! Farmbrite comes preloaded with dozens of Livestock reports. You'll see inventory reports based on status, breeding and reproduction success summaries, feed performance comparisons to weight gained, and a lot more. Many of these reports can be customized to include your own filters, fields, and charts if you'd like. Or, you can start from scratch and make your own custom livestock reports. This lets you choose what you want to see on the report, including what data columns should display, what filters should be applied, and how the report should be sorted and grouped. you can even add charts to these custom reports as well.

Articles

Getting Started with Livestock
Learn about getting started with the Livestock section of your Farmbrite account.
Livestock Dashboard
Find critical herd information on your Farmbrite Livestock Dashboard - Grazing, births, charts, and more.
Animal Photos
Keep photos of livestock easily accessible in Farmbrite to track growth, size, and genealogy traits.
Keeping Animal Files
Learn more about how to store documents and important files for your livestock and farm animals.
Active Animal Count
Learn more about how your Active Animal Count is determined for your Farmbrite subscription.