About
Why this app exists
Built in the United States alongside youth livestock exhibitors, by someone who got tired of watching a season of genuine work get reconstructed from a shoebox the week the book was due.
The problem was never the animal
Anyone around a market livestock project knows the pattern. The animal gets fed, walked, rinsed and worked with every single day, without fail, for the better part of a year. The records get kept in a drawer, a phone note, a whiteboard in the barn, and three different feed tags.
Then the record book is due. A season of real work — the part that was supposed to be the lesson — gets reassembled at a kitchen table from memory and receipts, and the figures are wrong in small ways that cost points.
That is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of having nowhere sensible to put a number the moment you have it, at the chute, with cold hands, before you forget.
Six record books, side by side
The data model behind this app did not come from imagining what a record book might ask for. It came from six real ones, compared line by line: Henry County, Tennessee; St. Lucie County, Florida, for both steer and swine, judged against a hundred-point rubric; and Johnston County, North Carolina, for goat, lamb, heifer and hog.
What that comparison made obvious is that no two books agree. They differ on eligibility rules, on which expenses belong in which category, on whether reflection is a free page or a set of graded prompts, on what counts as an official weigh-in. Any app built around one county’s book would be wrong everywhere else.
So every book is driven by a template, and adding a county is a new template file rather than a new version of the app.
The rule I will not break
The app does the arithmetic. The student does the thinking.
It would be trivial to have this app write a project story, draft a buyer’s letter, or suggest a reflection. Plenty of software would. That is precisely the work the record book exists to teach, and handing it over would make the app worse than useless — it would make it dishonest.
So the app organises, prompts, reminds, totals and formats. It renders the frame of a business letter and offers a checklist of what a strong one usually covers. Every sentence of the body is typed by the exhibitor.
Decisions I made on purpose
Feed nutrition fields are blank. Guaranteed analysis changes between formulations and regions. A stale number baked into an app would be copied into a record book and be wrong with no way to tell. The tag on the bag is the source.
Expected birth dates are windows, not dates. Animals vary by about a week either side of the species average, and someone planning to be present for a birth needs the range.
Averages are withheld until there is a span behind them. Two hours logged on day one extrapolates to “seven hours a week”. Arithmetically true, and a lie about the student’s actual work.
There is no weather lookup. It would have transmitted an animal’s location. The show directory is the app’s only network call, and it is a plain download of a public list.
Who it is for
Families keeping market livestock project records, and anyone keeping production records for animals that are not going anywhere near a show ring. A household raising one steer, or an operation watching what a pen costs to put weight on.
It is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any youth organisation, fair, school, club, breed association, government programme or livestock show.
Built and maintained by J.D. Mixon. Questions, problems and suggestions all go to the same place — the support page.
Keep this season’s records properly.
Free while the app is in testing. One price after that, and it stays yours.