I am hoping that putting this out there will stimulate conversation and/or that someone will already have figured out a good solution on their operation.
So, I have a cart before the horse problem… when a lamb is born I want to fill out a birthing log. However, they don’t get ear tagged until about 3 days after birth.
This year using FarmOS, my process has been:
-fill out a birth quick form with that I think the tag numbers will be
-3 days later reference the logs whilst tagging to try to match up the sex with the lamb
-hope I don’t mess this up and then have ewes logged as rams and vice versa
It has felt a little bit cumbersome for a couple of reasons. One is that it is sort of challenging to navigate the mobile web while out in the field to pull up and reference the records. Another is that I don’t necessarily have internet in the field so in some cases I have to write down a bunch of info from farmos and then go out and do the tagging. A third thing is that it’s totally possible that a lamb doesn’t make it from birth to that 3rd day and while this is rare, it would throw off all of my tagging – I would need to move everyone up by one tag number. If I’m 15 or 20 lambs deep over the course of 3 days, that is a lot of rewriting records.
I’m just putting this out here to see if anyone has had similar issues and has a different flow or any tips for how they manage such record keeping with the platform.
Thanks!
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Hmm yea that sounds frustrating. I wonder if it would make sense to do it in two passes. So leave the tag blank when you fill out the Birth quick form, and then have a process of adding tags later once you have them all established. Granted, there isn’t a quick UI for doing this right now, but a custom API script could probably make quick work of it. I could also imagine some kind of “bulk tag editor” UI in farmOS itself that showed a list of all animals (with the ability to filter), with a box to fill in the tag information on each. There are some questions there… because technically it’s possible to add multiple tags. But wonder if something like that would be generally useful… 
I’m curious too if anyone else has faced this issue.
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With rabbits it is nearly impossible to keep track of the identities of the babies and some die early on. My workflow is that I just create a log capturing when the birth was (and who the mom was). Creating the child rabbits and identifying which are male/female happens later in the process.
For better or worse, the birth log is mutable so it isn’t necessary at a data-model level to have the children created when the birth log is created. They can be created later and added to the birth log.
Not sure if that helps - other than agreeing that the simple workflow from the birth quickform doesn’t capture all use-cases.
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This is great feedback. I’m not at a place right now where I can devote energy to learning to code something to interact with the API.
As things are, it is very functional.
@Symbioquine Thanks for the idea of filling things out in two stages like you do for rabbits.
@mstenta Is there any conversation about a FarmOS app to make data entry a little bit more straight forward on mobile?
Is there any way to log data offline?
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@Symbioquine has created a great PWA (Progressive webapp) that is in alpha now and that works great for data entry, it is also possible to modify and add functionality with plugins. It even works out in the fields without connectivity and will sync the data with farmos once you have connectivity again.
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Field Kit is the “official” work-in-progess app that aims to target offline/in-the-field data entry, but progress has been slow because it doesn’t have dedicated funding right now.
@Symbioquine’s Asset Link has been developing towards a beta release as well. Check out the community blog post here for more info: Introducing Asset Link (video) | farmOS
Neither are available on Farmier currently, because they are still in alpha. But I did set up a test instance for each so that folks could join in the testing process. If you want access to either of those we can make you logins! Reach out in chat and one of us (@Symbioquine @jgaehring or myself) can set you up. It won’t be using your data, though, just the test instances’ data. But getting feedback is the best way to move towards beta releases. Well… that and funding! 
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