Herdly 1.1 Release Notes

The highlights of this version of Herdly are printing from the Animal List window, the ability to track exposures and matings, and the ability to have a group of sires associated with an animal. Continue reading for more details.

New Features

  • On computers, you can now use the Print button in the Animal List window to print a report. Herdly will print the columns currently showing in the window, so choose the columns and widths before printing. It also prints the animals as currently shown in the window. This means that if you print the same report over and over, you can save it as a workspace once it is set up and then have quick access to the same report in the future. See Printing for more information.
  • There is a new Raised At field associated with an animal's arrival information where you can store the name of the person or ranch where the animal was raised. This field will default to your own ranch for new calves. You can set this field in the New Animal and Edit Animal actions as well as see it in the Animal History action.
  • When you use the Move Animals action, you can now include a note that is associated with that move event for each selected animal.
  • Herdly can now track when cows are exposed to bulls during the breeding season. This allows Herdly to compute the first and last possible calving date for cows. It also makes it possible to show a list of possible sires when recording the sire of a new calf. The nice things about exposures is that Herdly will automatically create new exposure records and close existing exposures based on animal movements. So if you use the Move Animals action to move bulls into a field that already have some cows, exposure records for each cow/bull combination will automatically be created. Similarly, if you pull the bulls using the Move Animals action, existing exposures between the pulled bulls and cows will be closed. You can manually create an exposure using the New Exposure Event action and these can be edited or deleted as well.
  • In addition to exposures, Herdly can now track specific mating events. These can be AI or natural mating events and they play into what Herdly knows about calving time and possible sires as well. Use the New Mating Event action for this. Matings can be edited and deleted as well.
  • On computers, Herdly can now show exposures and matings as child lists. On both computers and mobile devices, they now show up in the Animal History action.
  • Up until now you could tell Herdly that the sire of an animal was an individual or a group, but you could only choose one bull as the sire. That has changed in this version where you can choose bulls using the new Choose Sire(s) window. In this window you are shown the estimated conception date of the animal and a list of bulls that are potential sires, based on exposure and mating records. You can select which bull(s) you want to associated with the calf. If the bull you are interested in isn't in the list, you can still select any bull in Herdly. When you are done with this window, if only one bull was selected Herdly will assign it as the biological bull and set the sire type to "Individual". If multiple bulls were selected, Herdly will not set the biological sire, but it will set the sire type to "Group"and show a list of the selected bulls. Please note that if you had set the sire type to "Group" prior to this version, the birth note will contain some information explaining this, but the actual sire type will have changed. You can go back and edit previous animals, adding the full sire groups, if you want, but you can no longer set the sire type manually.
  • First Breeding Date, Last Breeding Date, First Possible Calving Date, and Last Possible Calving Date fields are now calculated as things change in Herdly.
  • On the computer, there is a new Gestation Calculator window available from the Animals menu which can be handy for calculating when to turn your bulls out or to pull them again. See Gestation Calculator for more information.
  • Herdly now sets a cow's breeding stage to Open, Exposed, or Pregnant automatically as it goes through the breeding cycle each year. You can still set this field manually in the Edit Animal action if needed, but Herdly will typically set it correctly automatically as you use the various actions to record events. Please see the new Typical Cow Life Cycle topic for more information.
  • Up until now, Herdly has been able to associated pictures of an animal with its birth, weaning, and yearling event as well as with notes. New in this version is the idea of a main picture of an animal. You can set or change an animal's main photo in the New Animal action and the Edit Animal action. It is shown in the Identification section of the Animal History action.
  • When you enter the number of days or months since conception during a Preg Check Event action, Herdly converts this to an estimated calving date internally. In the past, the actual number of days or months was lost. That has changed in this version and any new preg checks that are recorded will remember the exact number you entered.

Bug Fixes

  • If you closed the Animal List window on a computer and it had a child list showing, the next time you opened the Animal List window it would forget to show the same child list. This is fixed.
  • Some of the score type advanced filters were not working correctly on mobile devices. This is fixed.