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FarmWizard makes life easier

The award-winning FarmWizard.com will exhibit at next week’s [Jan 30] Fintona show for the first time. The Northern Ireland company provides an online herd management service which is used by hundreds of dairy and beef farmers helping them save time otherwise spent keeping paper records. FarmWizard’s Mark Elliott said: “Farmers are constantly being asked to record more and more information, whether it be for their herd books or Farm Quality Assurance Schemes. “What we have done with FarmWizard is to cut down on the paperwork by reusing information that exists already and removing the need to register the same information in more than one place.” “For example when a farmer registers on FarmWizard, we download their entire herd from APHIS online and onto the farmer’s personal DARD accepted herd book. This allows them to get started using the service straight away,” said Mark. When a farmer buys or sells animals, the animals and their movement details can be automatically downloaded again from APHIS, providing an almost self-updating DARD-accepted herd book. One beef enterprise which has reaped the benefits of FarmWizard is the McCreas in Co Tyrone. “Using FarmWizard has reduced the record keeping labour required to manage our beef enterprise by 4-5 hours per week,’’ Andrew McCrea said.

FarmWizard is widely regarded as the most user-friendly herd management solution, as it only requires a web browser and internet access. No software is necessary – if you can browse the internet you can make full use of FarmWizard. FarmWizard can be used to produce mc2a permits, track beef performance through daily liveweight gains and turnover per head per month. For dairy farmers the system improves fertility by sending out reminders of when animals are due to go into heat. Gareth uses PDA to access breeding records on a cow Information can be recorded and accessed out in the fields using either a simple mobile phone text message or a handheld PDA computer.