The Tipperary-based farm-management software company Herdwatch, has created a new sheep management app, ‘Flockwatch’.
Herdwatch was co-founded out of the farmer-owned cooperative FRS Network eight years ago and is used on over 16,000 farms across Ireland and the UK.
The company has said that its simple, easy to use and reliable app saves farmers an average of three hours a week on paperwork, according to a recent member survey which received over 1,600 responses.
Sheep management app
The new Flockwatch service, which has seen Herdwatch invest over €500,000 in the future of sheep farming to date, will help sheep farmers turn their data into profit by allowing them to manage flock performance to ultimately sell more lambs.
It allows farmers to:
- Manage flocks individually or in groups;
- Record lambing and track ewe performance;
- Add weight recordings to track average daily gains;
- Connect an electronic identification (EID) reader to scan ear tags and view an animal’s history or add records easily;
- Capture feed and medicine records for farm compliance.
CEO and co-founder, Fabien Peyaud said: “When we launched Herdwatch we set out to help farmers reduce the overwhelming amount of paperwork required for farm compliance.
“Since then, Herdwatch has evolved into an app that is as much about monitoring herd performance as it is about compliance, and our existing members find it very useful to make better and faster on-farm decisions.”
“Flockwatch is going to do the same thing for sheep farmers by allowing them to track flock performance and health individually or in groups in one simple-to-use app,” he added.
“It really shows the direction of travel of our business by taking the best of what we have learned from working with cattle farmers and applying those learnings to different farm enterprises.”
Herdwatch has said that it is focused on the digitalisation of farming for the benefit of farmers in order to make their businesses more sustainable and profitable.
“Up to this point anyone who wanted to manage their flock had had very little to choose from, with most relying on pen and paper, and the famous biscuit tin,” Peyaud said.
“With Flockwatch, sheep farmers now have an app at their fingertips which will allow rapid capture of lambing, breeding, weighing, medicines records and more.
“The Flockwatch app will highlight the best and worst performing ewes in order to make better decisions for the following season.”