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Wendy Lee and her husband run Tiannan Woods Goats (http://tiannanwoods.com) in Philadelphia, TN. They have a small herd that they are raising to sell as meat. It is important that they keep careful records of breedings and in particular the following types of information:

• Knowing when the does are ready to kid
• Knowing when to give vaccinations
• Keeping performance records of the kids as they grow so that they know if they are feeding them too much or too little
• Tracking prices
• Tracking farm expenses

There are herd keeping programs available, but most of them are either for Microsoft Windows, are too expensive or are just not really what they needed. They have tried keeping records in a spreadsheet which works but is not ideal and since Wendy got a new iMac for Christmas which came with Leopard installed and a preview of Bento she decided to give it a spin and soon knew that she had found what she needed.

The current plan is to use Bento in combination with Numbers (to keep track of milking production for the dairy goats) but the majority of their records will be kept in Bento.

The main Herd Book form looks like this:

Click for a Larger View (753 x 474)
Click for the Largest View (1506 x 947)

Here they can see all the pertinent information about each animal including the date of birth, registration number, breed, tattoo number, eartag number (if applicable), who she/he was bought from, parents, etc.

They have another form based on a Smart Collection:

Click for a Larger View (753 x 474)
Click for the Largest View (1506 x 947)

This form shows the animals in their kid crop.

On thing that Wendy wants to do on this form is to be able to take the date of birth and have a list of days at which I need to weigh the kids and input those weights and Bento which will then calculate weight gain for me.

The Library also contains a set of fields ready to store the information pertaining to the animal when it is either sold or processed.

Eventually she wants to be able to add pedigree search information and, although she has not figured out exactly how she want to be able to do that, she wants to be able to list on each doe’s page her kids from what years.

Wendy says that this is just the beginning of the kind of information she can see her keeping for their business. They have some good genetics in both their dairy and meat goats and hope to be able to sell some breeding stock as well as meat.

Being able to print invoices is also on the wish-list.

As a final word, Wendy says that, “for the price, I’m finding Bento to be a great, useful product.”

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