Into the unknown - farmers today need to know their bytes from their bales.......

A personal blog about living on a farm and the evolution from cereal packets to apps........



Into the unknown - farmers today need to know their bytes from their bales.....


Being married to a farmer who also has to work full time off the farm is not the easiest of life styles, but for us (generally speaking) this model works. Like the majority of farms in this country we need to have a second 'off farm' income to survive. We are beef farmers, that means we breed our own cattle, raise them and sell them directly to meat processing plants at around 30 months old.

In the 20 years I have lived on this farm I have seen my husbands record keeping skills evolve from writing cattle ID numbers on the back of recycled weetabix boxes to using a specific IT package to keep accounts. He can upload details to the Department of Agriculture website while standing in the middle of the field using his mobile and keep track of animal births, deaths and I wish I could say marriages because that would take this blog in a whole lot more entertaining!

We have an accounts package supplied by Kingswood Accounting (link below) to thank for this evolution. We can keep our accounts, track sales, supply reports for Bord Bia auditors, and by using the Kingswood phone app we can scan QR codes on medicines and track what animal gets what medicines, essential both for traceability and cost control. We can see when an animal isn't thriving and when an animal needs to be sold on. All of this new technology is invaluable to us because we just don't have the time to deal in scraps of paper and notebooks anymore. We need to fit all of the animal husbandry and farm planning that my husbands father saw as a full time job into weekends and a couple of hours each evening.

                                    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnVDcW_yCuU


Recently the Department of Agriculture decided that all cattle need to be weighed twice a year and that weight recorded, not an easy task when your cattle didn't get the memo! Thanks to the latest addition to the Kingswood package we can now use digital ID tags in our animals ears to help us make this job a more relaxed two person job and with nobody having to shout numbers across the yard the risk of entry errors and divorce is greatly reduced.

So, it is fair to say that our farm is easier to run and planning is easier because of new technology. We know that as our business grows the industry will continue to come up with creative labour saving ICT.  A look at the article below from EOLAS gives us an idea of what the future holds for Irish farms.


For further information about the Kingswood app please check out the link below - https://kingswoodcomputing.com/


For further information about how new technology will influence farming in the future check out this report in EOLAS (2017) - https://www.eolasmagazine.ie/new-technologies-driving-agriculture/