Herdwatch, a mobile herd management software and app that helps with farm administration, is one of several businesses that came away with an award at the Toplink Innovation Arena Awards at the Ploughing, taking home the gong for Software (Established Company).

This product allows users to register calves and record remedies on the go. New updates also allow users to manage the full breeding cycle, from heat checks to inseminations as well as pregnancy scan results.

Irish Country Living speaks to two women who say Herdwatch has saved them hours with farm paperwork.

Brigid McGrath

Brigid McGrath helps her husband David McGrath with his suckler herd in Co Clare.

With a full-time job as a civil servant and six children between the ages of 11 and 19, Brigid says she used to spend three to four hours a week on paperwork.

“I was always registering calves and doing herd registers. I was up until all hours of the morning trying to do things.”

Brigid is very happy using the Department of Agriculture website to register calves, but says the biggest ordeal with farm paperwork is animal remedies.

“You need the batch number, you need dates and the bottle number has to correspond with the herd number.”

Given that she spends many evenings ferrying her children around to extra-curricular activities, Brigid was looking for something she could use in the car while waiting at a match.

Even though she was given a test package for free after meeting Herdwatch at the Ploughing last year (in fact, she was the very first person to register a calf on Herdwatch), Brigid says she would actually pay a couple of hundred euro for the product.

“It works in any place. Even where you don’t have good internet coverage, it works well.”

Even though some farmers aren’t very tech-savvy, Brigid feels that older farmers who find paperwork impossible, would actually find Herdwatch easier to deal with. “If you can text, you can use it.”

Patricia Hearne

“Basically for me, recording before Herdwatch was very hit and miss. It was a book and a pen. And you know when your hands are wet...”

So says Patricia Hearne who is a full-time farmer with husband Patrick in Co Waterford where they live with three “smallies” as Patricia calls them – Kieran (10), Lauren (eight) and Sarah (five).

“You have the intention of doing it when you come home, but when you get home you might have to go to hurling or dancing or football, whereas with Herdwatch you have your phone with you and it’s like texting – it’s done within seconds.

“I used to sit down and do a batch of 10 registrations each night. I can’t wait for January to come – when the calves are born I register them through an app on my phone. It’s sent automatically to the department and I’ll receive the card in the post.

But Patricia says there’s a lot more to Herdwatch than tag numbers and registration. “It’s so much more, it’s a Godsend.”

“If you buy a product, for example, Cronyxin, from a vet, you enter in the batch number and the expiry date of the product. Then when the cow has an infection and you take out the bottle of Cronyxin to treat her, I don’t have to put all that information into the system again. It links everything automatically.”

A department inspector recently arrived on the farm and took a bottle of cronyxin from a filing cabinet and asked what animals the product was used on and what date it was bought. Patricia hit “related animals” and “related tasks” on the app and the batch number and other relevant details came up.

“It stopped me searching copies and saying, ‘oh wait until I find it here’. There was none of this fear factor – I never had such an easy inspection in my life.”

Herdwatch is priced at €99 including VAT. It can be used on smartphones, tablets or computers. Losing any of these devices doesn’t equate to losing data as the content is securely backed up to a Herdwatch server.

For more information, text frs 22 to 51444 and you will receive a call back from the Herdwatch team, or visit www.herdwatch.ie

Herdwatch is part of FRS (Farm Relief Services).