Cattle Records: Choosing the right software

Something that is often in the background and overlooked when you are starting a cattle business, is the actual documentation and organization of all of your records.  This will encompass everything from feed schedules to buying and selling your cattle and yields.  Having the right program will allow you to maximize your profits and not waste valuable time that can be spent on caring for your herd.

Software management programs are becoming more and more popular in the cattle business and the programs that are now available are actually quite good.  Choosing the proper program to manage your herd is going to take some effort on your part as you are going to want to personally check them out to see which ones work the best.

One of the great features of most programming is that they will offer a free trial of about a month to allow you to give it a dry run and see if it works for you.  There is no need to try them all, but you will definitely want to give a couple of them a try before settling on one.  You may find that they will each offer special features that will be unique to the program and it will be up to you to decide which features are more important to your business.

A quick internet search will yield quite a few choices.  There are actually even quite a few free programs that you may want to use just to get the hang of operating a system.  Again though, most of the major systems will allow you a free trial of about a month.

One of the more popular systems that is currently being used Cattle Max.  The software is pretty complex and claims to be able to reduce errors significantly.  One of the major factors is its ability to capture real time weights in the chute to help you monitor your herd.  The programming itself is relatively inexpensive.

Standard features of the programming are pictures of your cattle, electronic id’s, medical records, cattle notes, and production records.  Some of the more advanced features are carcass data,Al breeding/semen data, complete EPD’s, pedigrees, sales catalogs, ET/embryo inventory and performance data and weight records.

Another great convenience of this software is its ability to interface with various Breed Associations.  In fact, it can interface with over 40 of them.  This is supposed to be unique to this program and is a vital accessory.  It makes things like registration and sales records a breeze to take care of.

This is only one example of the benefits of cattle records software.  This is a more general program, but there is even programming that is specific to different types of breeds.  The best thing to do is decide what is most important as far as you are concerned and the compare the features in a list with what each program claims to offer.  Once you have them narrowed down, give them a test drive and see which one works best for you.

It will only be a matter of time before the programming pays you back in the money and time that it saves you in being able to properly manage your herd and maintain all your records.  When you think about it, the price of the software is probably less than the weekly salary of someone that you would have to pay to maintain all of these records and they would only be able to accomplish a small percentage of what this software is able to maintain.  It will pay for itself before you know it!