Using farmos to record daily milk production for my dairy farm

[dennis]

hi everyone.any one who has effectively used farmos to keep milk production and feeds intake for his/her dairy farm.I would love to be guided on how to go about it.thankyou

[Farmer-Ed]

I’m not a Dairy farmer but probably plenty in common to Drystock too.

Do you receive any data back from the company that collects your milk? as a file or through API access?

Any other sources of data that you receive / collect from other sources?

Concentrates composition / feed rates.

Grass Measuring / Soil Testing / Fertilizer etc

Fertility / Breeding / Genomics

Medications

[dennis]

Hi Eddie.

We normally monthly cumulative no of kg for the milk…

At the farm we record each cow’s daily output manually and we really wanted to digitize our daily records for the milk and feeds

[Farmer-Ed]

How manually is manually? Pen and paper from manual milk meters?

Have you a working instance of farmOS yet? (There is a demo instance you can experiment with for 12 hours if not, https://farmos-demo.rootedsolutions.io/ )
I’d say the simplest way to record in farmOS is Enter all your cows as ‘Animal Assets’ and then create ‘Observation Logs’ for each milking the log can the reference the animal and record as many quantities as you like milk in Kg’s and cell counts etc.

For less simple, if you dabble in code a more interesting and dedicated Dairy module could be developed.

[pat]

@Farmer-Ed

Have you a working instance of farmOS yet? (There is a demo instance you can experiment with for 12 hours if not, https://farmos-demo.rootedsolutions.io/ )

Just want to add that it’s possible to register for a trial at Farmier.net too.
Believe you can use it for 30 days, and then keep the data if you subscribe.

[mstenta]

@Farmer-Ed

I’d say the simplest way to record in farmOS is Enter all your cows as ‘Animal Assets’ and then create ‘Observation Logs’ for each milking the log can the reference the animal and record as many quantities as you like milk in Kg’s and cell counts etc.

I agree with all this except that I would recommend “Harvest” logs for milk instead of “Observations”.

That is the convention that was used in the “Milk quick form” in farmOS v1. Observations are more intended for “passive” measurements.

[Farmer-Ed]

Probably makes more sense…
I don’t like the language though personally I’d have to make a Dairy module if I was still milking cows.

[mstenta]

@mstenta

I would recommend “Harvest” logs for milk

In the early days of farmOS I contemplated (very briefly) calling them “Input” logs and “Output” logs - to represent things that were brought into the system, and things that were taken out of the system. Everything else is “internal”. Ultimately I think calling it “Harvest” was more intuitive to most people.

[Farmer-Ed]

@mstenta

Ultimately I think calling it “Harvest” was more intuitive to most people.

Inputs is a term generally used by most farmers regardless of enterprise and is fairly intuitive, “output” doesn’t have the same universal usage though but neither does “harvest”. I’ve never heard of a livestock farmer using the term harvest to describe their “output” in the form of eggs, milk or meat. Does there need to be only one output log type?

“Plant based alternative” terms may even be a little off putting for some livestock farmers!

[Symbioquine]

I guess there’s always going to be that tension between farmOS maintaining a super fine-grained model and making do with a more generic one that mostly fits.

Just spit-balling here, but I wonder if there should be a “conventions” functionality - let’s call it “record type aliasing” - where the underlying data model is the same, but the presentation/verbiage is “skinned” to match the use-case more closely. Kind of similar to Quick Forms, except that it would affect the asset/log display as well as the creation/edit form, and wouldn’t allow arbitrary form structures.

In that way, you could use the data model for the Harvest log type, but for a Cow Milking log, “alias” the Assets: field to Cows:.