I have been playing the Field Kit Movement tool to move Animal between paddocks. Obviously it works and is clever the way it displays locations once picked. However it is not very user friendly when one has several mobs of animals (assets) with the same name such as “sheep” as I do.
There is no way to know where the asset Movement from is at the time of picking from the list. It becomes even more troublesome when there are two mobs of sheep in the same Movement from location. Rams and Ewes in my case.
This issue does not arise in FarmOS because the Sheep group and location can easily be seen in the asset list prior to picking it to move.
I know some other stock management tools have you pick the Movement from location as the starting point which mitigates this issue somewhat. I realise another option is from me to come up with more descriptive asset names. I could do this by concatenating Name, Group and Location but this would be tedious and counter productive.
Anyhow I can still merrily use the FarmOS app as I have pretty good connectivity on my farm. Just passing on my thoughts of the Movement form.
Hi Logger, why not have in your Asset group Sheep as you have it and add the following two names in the Asset as Sheep Ewes and Sheep Rams. Would this not help you to identify which flock is in which camp?
Thanks that is a good idea, except my screen grab above only represents a fraction of my sheep & cattle herd. Once entry is complete there will be about 10 Sheep Ewe mobs and another 10 Cattle Cow mobs. So this would mean the picker would look like this:
Sheep Ewe
Sheep Ewe
Sheep Ewe
Sheep Ewe
Sheep Ewe
Sheep Ewe, etc
So not ideal. By being offered Movement from location in the picker first presumably the asset choices could be limited to what is located there, simplifying the process of picking the correct asset to move.
Thanks for the input @Logger! All good points/ideas. And thanks @jennygail for the suggestions regarding naming.
I tend to agree with @jennygail that having unique names could be part of the solution here. Even if you just had “Sheep Mob 1/2/3/etc”, that might make things easier to identify - both in Field Kit as well as other places.
I do like the idea of adding some kind of “Movement From” first step selection to Field Kit! Or… perhaps in the Field Kit Movement tab, when you are selecting an asset, it could tack on the asset’s current location in parentheses… so it would show as “Sheep (Olympic)” automatically. Maybe that’s a simple solution.
Another thing worth mentioning: when we designed the Movement tab in Field Kit, the primary use-case was for loading pre-planned movements into Field Kit, so they could be updated/marked as done. So the idea was: you plan your moves in advance in farmOS, then use Field Kit to load them up, perform them, and then mark them done. Maybe that kind of workflow would work for you @Logger? Then you would be creating the movement logs in farmOS, where you have all that information already.
I agree that is a problem.
Firstly, what breed of sheep do you have and what breed of cattle do you have?
I am located in South Africa and have just started breeding Black Dorpers. I bought a flock that all the ewes are full mouth to broken mouth. They came with their lambs to me with April lambs and then gave me lambs in October and November 2019.
In January this year, my husband and I went to a well known Dorper breed in the Karroo by the name of Dries Weiss. I bought Black Dorper ewes (2 teeth) and White Dorper ewes (6 months old) which are of flock quality and also, at the same time bought a Stud Black Dorper Ram.
Why I’m telling us this is just to give you some background.
In FarmSo, whilst you are creating the asset types, there is a heading called Group membership. That is for the whole flock and herd of cattle you have. Within the Gerenal heading it asks for breed/species. This is where we differentiate between the various groups of the flock and our beef herd. Then, you can ho down and then go to Grazing and select which camp they go to.
But, you need to setup numbers or names to each of your camps.
Great feedback, @Logger, and I think @jennygail has a point about naming, but I also really like your idea and think would be a great feature even if there weren’t naming conflicts.
We have Angus and Hereford Cattle (~700 head). Sheep we have White Suffolk and Southdown Rams along with 1st cross merino Ewes (~1800 head).
So the Group membership can theoretically apply to every animal from any species, but on the other hand it can still be used to group subset of a single species. So with my arrangement, while it would be possible to group a cattle angus asset into ewes or sheep southdown asset into steers they are both nonsensical so it would not happen.
I did initially try using the breed/species field to record both those items. However I found little value in including the species (cattle/sheep) here as it actually reduced usability for me. Whereas placing species in the name field meant a single filter for cattle or sheep in the /farm/assets/animals lists name field, will neatly split my Sheep and Beef operations.
I see the need for a unique Name for each Mob/Camp as a nuisance. Every animal asset item already has a unique asset ID. Having to dream up a unique name or number would be annoying.
I have not installed the Grazing module as yet, because I am not convinced I need to add this complexity. Indeed I have so far only entered 10% of my stock as I am still deciding the optimal way to configure things. So thank you for the suggestions as they all help.
Correct me if I’m wrong @jgaehring, but I believe the mockup was suggesting using the name of the asset’s current area/field/paddock as the disambiguating text. They would only be points of the compass if your fields were already named like that.
By points of the compass you mean how I’ve named the field “North”, “South” etc in the mockup? Yea, those are just my stock placeholders for farmOS areas (think “foo”/“bar”). Not implying the compass points would be determined by FK in any way. I reality, the locations would probably be some sort of folksy farmery name, like “Old Peach Grove” or “Bill’s Tater Field” or “Hen House Field” or something like that.
