This month we have focused on a large new feature, with a few other updates added as well. First, your livestock measurements have been improved include much more information, including details about the animal's health and environment, with the ability to attach pictures and comments to them as well. The health and wellness assessments you make are summarized in a new Wellness Score, which provides a quick visual representation of the animals overall health. Of course, with these updates come new reports and processes to help you ensure you herd is healthy and living their best lives. Beyond these enhancements, we've also added a way for you to save time when importing new records, and an Activity Log to help you keep track of what happens on your farm every day.
Animal Wellness Measurements
Measuring key performance indicators on your animals goes beyond just height and weight! You can of course still take the standard physical measurements, and now you can also rate their body condition, environment, and even keep photos and additional details for issues you find. Just navigate to an animal record, create a new measurement, and you'll see 4 new tabs that you can work with.
- Health Assessment - You'll find 20 new data points to assess for the animal here. Each is rated on a scale of 1-5, from Poor (1) to Excellent (5), and can be selected individually or in bulk. There are external measurements for things like eyes, ears, and nose, as well as internal measurements for heart health, lung health, and more. You can also record assessments for more general characteristics like appetite, water consumption, and stress level.
- Environment Assessment - Similar to the Health section, but with 6 fields to track things like air quality, temperature, moisture, insect activity, and cleanliness. Like Health, each is rated on a scale of 1-5, from Poor (1) to Excellent (5) and can be selected individually or in bulk.
- Photos - If you find any issues you'd like to document, or just want to capture a photo of a health and happy animal, you can add them here. If you are using Farmbrite's mobile app, this can integrate with your camera to capture a real time photo as you are recording the measurement.
- Comments - Take any notes you need to add more details about what you have observed in the measurement.
If you need to follow up after an examination, you can also flag the record, and then run reports to find animals with flagged measurements to be sure you address their issues.
The health and environment assessments from the measurement are compiled and summarized in Farmbrite's Animal Wellness Score, which gives you an at-a-glance reading of the overall health of your animal. This score is displayed on the animal's record, and can be added to group dashboards to see it for multiple animals at once. You can also use it to filter groups, lists, and reports to find animals that meet your criteria, whether you're looking for the healthiest animals to breed, or animals with issues that need to be resolved.
Bulk Importing Default Values
When you import new records into Farmbrite, you'll now find a feature to Optionally Specify Default Values, which you can use to supply a value for a specific field to be used for all the records on your import sheet. You'll now see this as an additional option at the bottom of the field mapping page during the import process. You can select any field relevant to the records you are importing, and add a value to be added to all of the records without having to have the data in the spreadsheet. So if you have a lot of records that require the exact same data, you can avoid potentially tedious spreadsheet work by adding the data here instead!
Activity Journal Entries
If you need to record a summary of what happened around your farm, you can now create a daily Activity Journal from your Farmbrite schedule. On the calendar, you can select to Add Activity Journal, and then write notes from the day. This could be used to record a visitor log, deliveries that arrived, or any number of other activities! They are also reportable, so you can easily see a list of all of them over a date range.
That's it for this month; let us know what ideas you have for future improvements that you'd like to see!