Frequently asked questions

It is coming soon to the App Store, for iPhone. No date is promised here, because App Review is Apple’s call rather than mine.

There is a box on the pricing page to leave an email address. It gets one message, on the day the listing goes live, and is not used for anything else.

Up to two exhibitors, one active animal each, for as long as you like. Everything that records a season is free: weights, feed, work, money, photographs, health and withdrawal records, milk and eggs, breeding, lessons, and goals.

So are reading all of it, backup and restore, reminders, contacts and the buyer tools, the show directory, charts on screen, sharing a status or a photograph, and choosing which county record book you keep and seeing what it still needs.

Pro is a yearly subscription. It adds a third exhibitor or more, more than one active animal for an exhibitor, making the county record book, the detailed report and its text version, and spreadsheet (CSV) files.

The price is whatever the App Store shows for your country. It is not printed here, because a figure that is right in one country is wrong in most of the rest.

Apple offers one month free to an Apple ID that has not had it before, when you start the subscription. It becomes a paid year at the end of that month unless you cancel at least 24 hours before, and the app tells you in the last week either way. Cancel in Settings on your device: tap your name, then Subscriptions.

The app no longer runs a trial of its own.

Everything already in the app stays and stays usable, and you go on logging exactly as before. What you cannot do is add a third exhibitor, or a second active animal for one exhibitor, or make reports.

Backup and restore are free at every status, and so are reading everything and the health and withdrawal records. Your season is never held hostage.

Yes. Backup and restore is free on every version, at every status. The backup file holds every figure and word you entered, and it moves to another phone.

That is deliberately the escape hatch, and it is what makes charging for the reports fair rather than coercive: Pro buys a county book laid out page by page and a report with the charts drawn, which is an evening of transcription saved. It does not buy the right to reach your own season.

Two things move, and they move separately.

Your records move in a backup file: save one in Settings and open it on the new phone. That works on every version, paid or not. The file holds everything you typed and does not hold the photographs. If iCloud Backup is switched on, it carries them, but it brings them back only when the new phone is set up from that backup, and then it brings the records back with them; a phone set up fresh and restored from the file reports its pictures missing. So before you wipe the old phone, share the pictures that matter out of the gallery and keep them with the family’s other photos.

A subscription moves through Apple: sign in with the same Apple ID and tap Restore Purchases. It is deliberately not in the backup file — that file is a child’s records, not a receipt.

Save a backup every so often and email it to yourself or a parent. Restoring it onto a new phone brings back every figure and word you entered. Photographs are not in that file: on an iPhone with iCloud Backup switched on, iCloud carries them, and a picture that matters can be shared out of the gallery and kept with the family’s other photos.

Records held only on a lost phone with no backup are lost with it. That is the honest trade-off of an app with no server: nobody else has your records, and that includes us. Keep the paper receipts too; they rebuild a money page when nothing else can.

Yes. Records are kept in a database on the phone itself, so logging a weight at the scale house works with no bars and no Wi-Fi.

The subscription check is the one part that needs to reach the store, and a phone that has checked before remembers the answer, so a paid year does not disappear at the scale house. A phone that has never checked starts on the free version, which still records everything.

Yes, and the app was built for it. Every screen accepts a past date: weights, feed purchases, expenses, income, work sessions, and shows all backfill.

No screen assumes it is being filled in live, because most people adopt a record-keeping app partway through a project year rather than on the first day.

On your device, and nobody else can see them. There is no account, no server holding your records, no cloud sync, no advertising, and no analytics.

Nothing you have written leaves the phone unless you send it yourself — a backup file, a report, a status message, or a photograph. The few requests the app does make are listed in the next answer.

Three things, and none of them carries a record of yours.

1. Published lists — shows, feeds, and breeders — downloaded as plain files. The app asks for the same file whoever is holding the phone.
2. A sponsor’s logo, when you open the breeder directory, from a short fixed list of addresses. That server sees a device asked for a picture, the way any website does.
3. A subscription check, asking Apple through RevenueCat whether this Apple ID has Pro. It carries an anonymous identifier and what was bought. No name, no exhibitor, no animal, no location, and nothing you typed.

Steer, heifer, dairy cattle, swine, lamb, goat, rabbit, poultry, and anything else under “Other.” A meat pen of rabbits or a pen of broilers is one project with a head count, since that is how it is weighed, shown, and sold; a breeding rabbit is an animal of its own.

No. A book can be kept as a youth or an adult record, and the choice changes which fields the form asks for and nothing else — the records themselves are identical.

A youth book keeps school, grade, and club. An adult book keeps farm name, phone, email, and website instead. So an adult running a ranch is never asked for a school grade.

Yes. A household keeps several books — siblings, and often an adult alongside a child. When there is more than one, the app asks whose book to open once per launch, and never asks when there is only one. The free version covers two exhibitors; a third is part of the subscription.

Five programs and eleven books so far. Choose your program by state and county: Henry County, Tennessee; Johnston County, North Carolina; Georgia; St. Lucie County, Florida; and Michigan, each laid out after that office’s own published edition. A species with no book of its own uses the detailed report.

Choosing a book and seeing what it still needs is free. Making the finished book is Pro, and so are the detailed report and the spreadsheet files.

The books are not produced or approved by those offices, editions change, and some programs require a handwritten book — check with your leader before handing in printed pages.

No, and it never will. The app supplies the structure and prompts your county’s book asks for, printed over ruled blank space, and where a book asks for a buyer’s letter or a thank-you letter it prints the frame of a business letter — a line for the date, lines for the address, and room for the salutation and closing — with the body left blank. Every sentence of it is written by the exhibitor.

Those are the parts a judge is grading, so they stay the student’s. That is the rule the whole app is designed around, and it is not a setting that can be turned off.

Yes, and never behind the subscription. Five of the eleven books have a health page, and Henry County’s explains the stakes: a student signs a certificate at the fair stating they observed every withdrawal time.

The app does the arithmetic — the date given plus the label’s days or hours — and states the meat, milk, and egg clearance dates plainly, so they are not being worked out from memory the night before check-in. It never says whether an animal may show; that is between you, your leader, and the show’s rules.

Photos attach to work sessions and collect into a gallery per animal, and a record book’s beginning and ending photographs have their own named slots. Every photo is re-encoded when it is attached, which strips its location metadata from the app’s copy. A photo or video taken with the app’s camera is also added to your Photos library as the original, unless you switch that off in Settings.

Video is the honest exception: its container metadata cannot be rewritten without a native module the app does not carry, so a shared clip may still say where it was filmed. The app says so before you share one.

Because a wrong number is worse than an empty one. Guaranteed analysis changes between formulations and regions, and a figure baked into an app would go stale, get copied into a record book, and be wrong with no way for a student to tell.

The tag on the bag is the source, reading it is part of the project, and once you enter it the value is saved against that product so it is a one-time job.

Because there is not enough time behind it to mean anything. Two hours logged on day one extrapolates to “seven hours a week,” which is arithmetically true and a lie about the student’s actual work.

When a figure is withheld the app says why, rather than showing a dash and leaving you guessing.

No. It keeps the records you enter and does the arithmetic on them. It gives no veterinary, medical, dosing, nutrition, legal, tax, or program advice.

Weight warnings state the arithmetic and the gap in plain numbers. What to change about a feeding program is a decision for the exhibitor with their parent, leader, or vet.

No. My Record Book is an independent app, built for families who keep those records. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by 4-H, the National FFA Organization, USDA, any fair, show, breed association, or school. Always follow the rules your own club, chapter, and show set.

Not yet. My Record Book is iPhone only for now. This page will say so plainly the day that changes.

Clear all local data in Settings erases every record on the device, and deleting the app does the same. Neither can be undone, and neither reaches a file you already shared or sent elsewhere.

Your records are never sent anywhere, so there is nothing of them held on a server for anyone to delete. A subscription is Apple’s record of a purchase, managed through your Apple ID.