For the Record
Record keeping on the farm can get complicated at times. I am going to share what we are doing now to stay up to date with all our information. This is an ever changing system, so we would love to hear how you keep your farm records!
Day to day: For daily happenings we use our big black book! This book is where we write down what we have done each day like moving sheep, refilling water, replacing hay, and doctoring. It’s just a quick reference to look back on if we need to know when something was done! We also use this book to write out monthly goals. When you are farming there is a never ending to do list and it is easy to get overwhelmed. Making a monthly list helps us identify what we want to accomplish other than our normal tasks.
Numbers: We are always moving sheep from pasture to pasture and changing up the numbers in the groups. To keep up with how many sheep are where, we have a command center in our lambing facility. On this white board we list out the pastures we are using at the moment and how many of each category of sheep are where. This also helps us keep track of what group is getting grain, how much, and when. With four people on the farm that all help with chores we found that this helps us all stay on the same page!
Lambing: We keep a clipboard in the lambing facility that gets filled out with each new lamb. We keep track of when they were born, the mother’s number, sex, weight, that they received their shots, and any extra notes. This information will then get transferred to the computer, but we keep the paper copy as well.
Tags: Our sheep all have ear tags with numbers so we can tell them apart in our records. We start their number with the year they were born, and then start at 001 and go up from there (6001, 7048, 8011.) When the lambs are born they are tagged with their mother’s number. Rams are tagged in the right ear, ewes are tagged in the left ear. We give the lambs their mother’s number so we can tell what babies belong to what ewe if they get mixed up! If we keep any ewe lambs, they will get their own number once they have their first lamb.
