Livestock management workflow (birth / death / sale / ...)

Using farmOS
4

Quick follow up for anyone interested (replying to myself, not sure it’s OK to do that - if not I’ll add an edit next time - sorry).

  • Birth: I’ve added a checkbox/group selection to the birth quick form (PR sent); issue solved :slight_smile:

  • Death/sale/…: a dedicated quick form initially looked like the best solution but in the end keeping the date of archiving dissociated from the date of death/sale actually makes much more sense for me:

    • we first move animals to dedicated groups - eg. “sold” or “dead”; that way the date on which an animal was sold/died is recorded (that’d be the “group membership” log’s date); groups also make it far easier to search/find those animals later on.
    • we then archive the animal(s) a few days later once they’re officialy declared sold/dead in the national livestock register. With that approach we thus have an exact register of both “unofficial” and “official” assets in the farm - which is a great way to keep up with the bureaucratic nightmare we have to deal with.

  • “Re-selecting” the assets of a previous log for further action seems like a pretty common task so I’m wondering how other fellow farmOS users do - maybe I’m overlooking something ? For instance I could create a “sales” log (eg. from the farm_ledger module), then be able to re-select the same animals from the log’s “view”, and from the resulting search view click the “Group” button to move the assets to a specific group (eg. for later archival). Right now I don’t see how to do that, other than manually selecting each animal, or using temporary/transient groups.
    (note: I tried to add a “search from assets” button to a log’s view but didn’t have enough time to understand Drupal’s internals ; also, given what I’ve read on the upcoming farmOS 2.x release, such change/feature would probably have to be redone for Drupal 9, so I’m leaving this aside for now.)

In a few weeks I’ll try to post the workflow we’ve settled on (still a moving target now) along with any issue/shortcomings - if any - that we’ve encountered and how we dealt with them. Hopefully it’ll be of interest for other fellow livestock farmers who are considering using farmOS !

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