Every calf, every weight, every crop year.

It knows the difference between a tag and an EID.

Most herd apps give you a box called “ID” and leave you to it. That is fine until you are standing at the chute with a wand in one hand and a tag that fell out last spring in the other.

Visual tag & EID

Separate fields, because they are separate numbers. The wand reads one; you read the other.

Crop year

The contemporary group. Performance is compared within a calf crop, not against the whole herd.

Sire & dam

Real links to real animals, so you can walk a pedigree instead of reading typed-in names.

Udder & teat score

Nine-point conformation scoring, kept where culling decisions get made.

Left & right tattoo

Two fields, not one. Registries ask for both.

Recip ID

For embryo transfer, where the cow that carried the calf is not the cow that made it.

Weights are rows, not columns.

Older programs gave a calf three weight fields — birth, weaning, yearling — and a matching date for each. Weigh an animal a fourth time and there was nowhere to put it.

Here every weighing is its own record with its own date and its own type. Weigh at branding, at turnout, on the way to the sale barn, or twice in a week. Nothing has to be overwritten to make room.

It tells you what needs doing.

Most herd programs are a filing cabinet — you get out what you put in, and only if you go looking. This one reads your own records back to you and says what is about to cost money.

A heifer born twin to a bull is infertile about nine times in ten, so keeping her as a replacement costs a year of feed and a calf that never comes. The old program recorded the twin birth and never mentioned it again — 903 of them turned up when the records were converted.

Written for where the cattle actually are.

Working pens do not have bars. Records you can only enter in the house, that evening, from memory, are records that get entered wrong or not at all.

Calf Book is being built to record first and sync afterwards — every animal carries an identifier its own device generated, so a phone that has been out of signal for a fortnight can come back and reconcile without duplicating a single calf.

Your herd records belong to you.

Not to us, and not to whoever sold you the software. You can export everything you have entered, in a format a spreadsheet will open, on any day you feel like it — including the day you decide to leave.

The last generation of herd programs is a warning worth heeding. Plenty of producers lost a decade of calving records when an app stopped being updated and the phone it lived on was replaced.