Features
Everything it keeps, and how
Everything a livestock project generates paperwork about, and what the app does with each one. The short version: it holds the figures and does the arithmetic, and it leaves every word a judge grades to the exhibitor.
Entry
Built for cold hands and thirty spare seconds
Everything starts from one screen: pick the animal, pick what you are recording, and you are two taps from done. Work, weight, expense, income, shows and photos all live behind the same six buttons.
Logging work is the habit the whole record book is built on. Everything else — the gain figures, the cost of gain, the hours in the book — follows from records that actually got entered on the day.
And every screen accepts a past date, so a stack of receipts from a shoebox goes in just as easily as this morning’s weigh-in.
Weights
Weigh-ins that take seconds and carry their context
A weight goes in with a date and how it was taken — certified scale, farm scale, girth-tape estimate, or a fair check-in. That method is kept with the record so a tape estimate is never mistaken for a scale weight six months later.
Mark the weigh-ins your record book counts, like the initial weight and fair check-in, and they carry through to the export as the official figures.
You set the weigh-in interval per animal — thirty days is a common starting point, but it is yours to change — and the app reminds you when one is due.
Gain
Two averages, because they answer two different questions
Lifetime average daily gain runs from the first weigh-in to the most recent. It is the official figure, and it is what belongs in the record book.
Recent trend looks only at the last two or three weigh-ins. It is noisier by nature, and that is the point — it moves first when something changes, which is what makes an early warning early.
Both are shown side by side rather than blended into one number, because a project that gained well for five months and stalled last month is not the same animal as one that has been steady throughout.
Feed
Feed cost, and what a pound of gain really costs
Record feed purchases and what was actually fed, and the app works out cost per pound of gain — the figure that separates a project from a pet.
Feed brands, lines and product names come seeded so you are not typing them out. Protein, fat and fibre are left blank on purpose: guaranteed analysis changes between formulations and regions, and a stale figure copied into a record book would be wrong with no way for a student to tell. You read it off the tag once, and it is saved against that product from then on.
Amounts are stored in whole cents from end to end, so a season of division and multiplication still foots at the bottom of the page.
Money
Expenses, income, depreciation and break-even
Categorised expenses and income, purchase price and sale price, with depreciation handled where the book asks for it. Categories follow what real record books ask for rather than a generic accounting list.
Break-even tells an exhibitor what the animal has to bring per pound to cover what has gone into it — the number that turns a sale price into a result rather than a surprise.
Every figure carries its date, so a mid-season adopter can enter a stack of receipts from a shoebox and still end up with a ledger that reads correctly.
Work
The daily work, logged before it is forgotten
Log a session against several animals at once — feeding, rinsing, walking, clipping, pen cleaning — with hours and notes, and photos or video attached straight from the barn.
Photos collect into a gallery per animal, which is where a project story gets its detail from months later.
Averages are withheld until there is enough time behind them to mean anything. Two hours logged on day one would extrapolate to “seven hours a week”, which is arithmetically true and a lie about the student’s actual work — and this figure ends up in a record book. When a figure is held back, the app says why rather than showing a dash.
Shows
Show dates, weight rules and what happened
Add a show and the weight window, minimum daily gain and entry details come prefilled from a published show list — then you confirm them, because show dates move and weight rules change.
Each prefilled figure shows where it came from and when the list was last updated. Edit a figure and that note clears, because from then on the number is yours.
Nothing in the app assumes a season calendar. Show timing differs by state — much of Florida shows in March — so “what is next” comes from your own show dates, never from an assumed month.
Buyers · Sam Whitfield
Buyers
A buyer list that behaves like a pipeline, not an address book
Buyers move through stages — might approach, invited, interested, bought — because selling an animal is a relationship built over months, and that is the part of the business lesson most easily lost.
Contacts hang off the exhibitor rather than the animal, so last year’s buyer is this year’s warmest lead, while the link to a specific animal says which conversation is actually about what.
The buyer’s letter and the thank-you letter are tracked as two separate dates, because record books grade them separately. The app records whether each was sent and flags a buyer who bought and has not been thanked. It writes neither — those are the graded work.
Breeding
Records for a project that does not end at a sale
Bred, due, birthed, rebred. Breeding records run year after year, which is what makes a record-keeping app worth opening in a month with no show in it.
An expected birth is reported as a window, not a date. Individual animals vary by roughly a week either side of the species average, and someone planning to be present for a birth needs the range — a single confident date would be worse than useless.
A due date you enter yourself always beats the species average, because someone with an ultrasound knows more than a table does. An unspecified species gets no invented figure at all.
Breeding · Willow
Coming up
Reminders
Local reminders, no server involved
Weigh-in reminders, overdue alerts, medication withdrawal clearances and buyer follow-ups are scheduled by your phone and shown by your phone. None of them travel through a server, and none contain anything beyond what you already entered.
Permission is asked for when you save an animal — the moment you have just chosen a weigh-in interval and the request makes sense — rather than being sprung at first launch.
If you decline, everything still works. Overdue weigh-ins are shown in the app as well, so nothing depends on a notification you never agreed to.
Sharing
Answer “how’s the steer doing?” without exporting a book
One animal’s current figures render as plain text you can paste into a message. That question gets asked constantly, and handing over a full record-book export to answer it is absurd.
A stale weight always carries its age. The number is leaving the phone and landing in someone else’s hands, so it has to say when it was taken.
The summary carries only figures the app computed — no reflection, no goals, no note to a buyer. A share button is exactly where it would be tempting to hand over written work, and the app’s own tests assert that it does not.
Ranger · status to share
And a short list of what it deliberately does not do
Every one of these would be easy to add. Each is left out on purpose.
- Write project stories, reflections or goals
- Write buyer letters or thank-you letters
- Give veterinary, nutrition, dosing, legal or tax advice
- Tell you what to change about a feeding programme
- Guess a feed’s protein, fat or fibre from memory
- Invent a gestation figure for an unspecified species
- Print an average with too few days behind it to mean anything
- Look up the weather, which would have transmitted an animal’s location
Get the season into one place.
Free while the app is in testing. One price after that, and it stays yours.