If your animals eat similar rations everyday, you can schedule repeat feedings to save yourself some time entering the feeding records. This can be done for up to 30 days, or any number less than that. So if you know a growing animal might have a changing feeding schedule, you can create these records in advance for a week or two, and then adjust after taking measurements and checking their average daily gain.
This feature is available for individual animal feedings and group feedings. It works nearly identically in both instances.
Repeated Single Animal Feedings
To schedule repeated feedings, simply navigate to the animal record and choose their Feedings tab. Today's date is prepopulated into the record, and you can choose to Add Repeat Feedings below it. You'll select an end date to the feedings, with a max being 30 days in the future. When you save, you'll see all of the future feedings created individually. Be careful, as repeated feedings need to adjusted on an individual basis if you make a mistake and need to update them.
In the example below we schedule 4lbs a day to be fed to one sheep until the end of May.
Repeated Group Feedings
If you want to feed the whole herd into the future, you can do so from the Feedings tab on a group records. Basically identical to the process above, but these records are created for all of the animals in a group at once. Saves you a lot of time, but again be careful, as feedings would need to be edited on an individual feeding basis.
We feed all 11 bison in our group example below.
How does this work with inventory?
Great question! When you schedule repeated feedings in the future and choose to use inventory, the inventory item will reflect the usage in the Available Quantity. Since it is preallocated and thus no longer available for use, you'll see the available quantity. We have a full article outlining how this works in the inventory section, but check out the example image below to see how the future usage is reflected. Note the 26.9 currently stored, but the 24.2 shown as available to be used after scheduling our future feedings for our chickens.
