Hello everyone. Today we’re going to talk about record-keeping for your livestock. No matter the livestock you run, every good operation knows that record keeping is paramount. From knowing which livestock are going to be culled, to knowing who your best producers are, it all comes down to good record keeping.
Here is a question for you. Computer records or written records? In the age of technology that we live in the computer is the obvious choice. You can easily keep records stored on a hard drive and enter data pretty easily if you’re decently savvy with programs like Excel or something like it. We thought so too, that is until we had children.
One day, while we were working on the computer, our 2-year-old decided he was going to take his plastic toy hammer to the laptop to “work on it/fix it” because it was broken don’t you know. Little did we know that he had the strength to destroy the hard drive that was located directly below where he happened to hammer. The boy only got 2 solid hits in before we stopped him, but we’ll give him the credit he’s handy with a hammer at the age of 2. Our beloved 2 year old just destroyed our computer and there was no recovering the records.
This led us to have both computer and written records. We know that sounds like a lot of work, but let us be real computers break, hard drives die, and the unexpected happens. Even external hard drives will wear out and break over time so you’re going to have to make multiple back-ups over the years.
We know, we haven’t mentioned the Cloud yet. The cloud is just like any other storage hard drive on someone else’s bigger servers. Servers can die and have issues just like any other piece of technology. Plus, to utilize the cloud an internet signal is required.
An argument against written records you say? Fire? Ah yes, in the event of a fire well I guess you can kiss all your record-keeping goodbye. Unless you want to keep all those records and laptops in a fireproof box. Honestly, we hope no one ever experiences a fire, and you can’t plan for every contingency. It will drive you crazy.
We are only sharing our experience with our record-keeping practices in hopes that maybe we have brought the attention of the topic to others. Maybe save them the same experience we had, plastic hammers and toddlers, who knew.
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