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.
Real 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 real ones, compared line by line, and this version lays out eleven of them from five programs: Henry County, Tennessee; Johnston County, North Carolina; Georgia’s statewide market hog books; St. Lucie County, Florida, judged against a hundred-point rubric; and Michigan’s statewide Intermediate book.
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, and 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 another office’s book is a new template file rather than a rewrite of the app. Each book is laid out after the office’s own edition; none is produced or approved by the office.
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 organizes, prompts, reminds, totals, and formats. Where a county book asks for a letter, it prints the office’s instruction over a blank business-letter frame — a line for the date, lines for the address, and ruled lines below — and writes nothing on any of them. Every sentence of it is written 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. One hour 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. Three things do leave the phone, and the privacy policy names each: the published show, feed, and breeder lists, which are plain downloads of public sheets; sponsor logos in the breeder directory; and the subscription check through RevenueCat. The app has no account, no analytics, and no advertising.
A season is never held hostage. Reading your records, backup and restore, and health records are free on every version at every status. A lapsed subscription takes away adding a third exhibitor or a second active animal, and making the reports; everything already there stays usable.
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 organization, fair, school, club, breed association, government program, 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 for up to two exhibitors, with one active animal each. Pro is a yearly subscription, and the App Store shows the price for your country.