Managing Your Feed List

The Feeds screen is your catalog of hay, grain, mineral and supplements. Every feeding is recorded against one of these, and the feed is what supplies the unit the quantity is measured in — so this is the first thing to set up.

How to Get There

Go to Production → Feed and click Feeds in the header.

Adding a Feed

1. Click Add Feed.
2. Enter a Feed Name — be specific: “Round Bale Fescue” rather than “Hay”.
3. Choose a Category and a Unit of Measure.
4. Optionally set Pounds per unit and a Default Cost per unit.
5. Tick This is a medicated feed if it applies, and give the withdrawal days.
6. Add any Notes, and click Save.

Categories

Hay, Grain, Mineral, Supplement, Silage, Byproduct, Other. The category is shown beside the feed when you pick it and on each line of the cost report.

Units of Measure

Pounds, Tons, Bales, Bushels, Gallons, Bags, Each.

Pick the unit you actually feed in. Every feeding of this feed is recorded in its unit, and changing the unit later does not convert existing entries — a quantity of 4 recorded as bales stays 4 after you switch the feed to tons. If you have the unit wrong and history already exists, it is cleaner to retire the feed and add a new one.

Pounds per Unit

Only offered when the unit is not already pounds. It is how many pounds are in one bale, ton, bag and so on — 1,200 for a big round bale, for instance.

This is used for one thing: the Lbs / head / day figure on the cost report, which lets you compare a bale of hay against a bag of cubes on the same scale. It is optional — leave it blank if you are unsure. Be aware that the report only shows that figure when every feed in the range has a pounds-per-unit value, since a partial total would understate consumption and still read as a real number.

Default Cost per Unit

What you normally pay for one unit. It is filled in automatically each time you record a feeding of this feed, and can be overridden on the entry when a load came in cheaper or dearer. Keeping it current is the single biggest time-saver in the whole feature.

Medicated Feeds

Tick This is a medicated feed and give the Withdrawal Days. When the feed is chosen on a feeding you get a warning naming the withdrawal period.

The warning is all it does. No withdrawal date is written onto the animals, and they will not appear on the Withdrawal / Waiting Period report because of a feeding. If you need withdrawal tracked per animal, record it as a treatment — see Tracking Withdrawal and Booster Dates.

Reading the List

The table shows Feed, Category, Unit, Lbs / Unit, Default Cost, Medicated (with the withdrawal days) and Status. Tick Show inactive to include retired feeds.

Retiring a Feed

Untick Active when you edit a feed. An inactive feed:

• stays on every past feeding, so your history and cost figures are unchanged;
• no longer appears when recording a new feeding;
• is hidden from the list unless Show inactive is ticked.

This is what to do with last year’s hay lot, or a supplement you have stopped buying.

Deleting a Feed

Use the delete action on the row and confirm.

A feed with feeding history cannot be deleted. You get a message telling you to mark it inactive instead — deleting it would orphan the log entries that rely on it for their name and unit. Delete is really only for a feed added by mistake and never used.

Tips

• One feed per thing you actually buy, not per category. “Round Bale Fescue” and “Square Bale Alfalfa” cost different amounts and belong on separate lines.
• Add a new feed for a new lot when the price moves a lot. Or just override the cost on the feeding — either works; the second keeps the list shorter.
• Fill in pounds per unit if you feed more than one form. It is the only way to compare hay and grain on a lbs-per-head-per-day basis.