There are three ways to get your herd into Herdy. If your animals are already registered in the livestock traffic database (TVD), the import from the TVD is the fastest and safest route: the ear tags then match the official register exactly.
Record an animal by hand
- Open the Animals module (in the sidebar on a computer, in the bottom bar on a phone).
- Click Register new animal.
- Fill in the form (details below).
- Click Record animal.
The animal then appears in your animal list and has its own profile.
Required fields
Only two entries are marked with a star and truly mandatory:
- Species: sheep, goat, cattle or pig. The choice sits at the very top and drives the rest of the form, for example the breed list and the ear-tag length.
- Sex: Herdy names it per species. For sheep Ewe or Ram, for goats Doe or Buck, for cattle Cow or Bull, for pigs Sow or Boar. Castrated animals are recorded as male with the additional Castrated flag.
All other fields are technically optional. For TVD notifications, however, you need ear tag, breed and date of birth, so it is best to record them straight away.
Identification
- Country of the ear tag: the default is CH for Switzerland. For animals bought abroad choose DE, FR, IT, AT or LI. Herdy does not check the length on foreign tags.
- Ear tag: the length depends on the species. Herdy shows the matching pattern below the field:
- Sheep: 8 digits, shown as
CH 1234.5678 - Goat: the 7 digits printed on the tag, shown as
CH 1234567. Herdy adds the leading zero internally - Cattle: 12 digits, shown as
CH 123.4567.8901.2
- Sheep: 8 digits, shown as
- Name: optional, for example "Bella".
Note for cattle farmers: Cattle carry two ear tags, at least one of them with an FDX-B chip. The number is typed or scanned into Herdy; a smartphone cannot read that chip.
Basic data
- Breed: pick from the list for that species, for example White Alpine Sheep, Saanen goat, Brown Swiss or Swiss Large White. For crossbreeds there are the entries Crossbreed and Other.
- Date of birth: prefilled with today's date, please adjust it.
- Birth farm: the TVD number of the holding where the animal was born.
Location & lineage
- Location: one of your recorded locations, such as home farm, barn, pasture or alp.
- Dam and Sire: chosen from the animals you have already recorded. This fills the pedigree later.
Additional details (optional)
You expand this area at the end of the form:
- Characteristics: colour, horn status (horned, polled, scurred) and tail length (normal, docked)
- Condition: body condition (BCS). The value is stored after the animal has been created
- Notes: free text
Tip: You do not have to fill everything in at once. Add details later through Edit in the animal profile.
Take animals over from the TVD
If your animals are registered in the livestock traffic database, bring them straight into Herdy.
Prerequisite: your Agate account is connected to Herdy and a TVD holding is selected. You set both up under TVD → Settings, see TVD settings.
- Open the TVD module and its Import tab.
- Click Import herd from TVD.
- Herdy loads your herd and shows a preview: new animals, updates, and animals that already exist unchanged.
- Check the selection. Animals that have already departed according to the TVD stay deselected and can be added individually. Summered animals may be among them.
- Click Import.
Herdy creates a profile with all available data for every animal and updates existing animals instead of duplicating them.
This is described in detail under Import herd.
Read animals in from a CSV file
If you keep your animals in a spreadsheet, or have an export from Agate, read that file in. You do not need TVD credentials for this.
- Open TVD → Import.
- Choose Import CSV file.
- Use Download template to get the sample file if you do not have a format yet.
- Drag your file into the field or click to select it.
- Herdy checks the file and shows how many rows are valid, how many animals are new and which will be updated. Faulty rows are named individually.
- Click Import animals.
Tip: Herdy uses the semicolon as the separator. If Herdy recognises an Agate TVD export, it says so. Those files have no species column, so pick the species in the Species field before importing.
Scanning ear tags
Instead of typing you can scan an ear tag, with the phone camera or with a Bluetooth reader. The Scan ear tag button on the animal list does that. How to set it up is described under Scan ear tags.
What next?
Once your first animals are recorded you can:
- search the animal list and filter by species, status, breed, group or withdrawal period
- build groups, for example by pasture or mating group, see Groups
- create TVD notifications for births, arrivals and departures, see TVD notifications
- record treatments and let the withdrawal periods be calculated automatically, see Treatments
- document matings and births, see Births
The next section explains the structure of the app.