The Mobs or Herds Add-on vs. the Individual Animal Records Add-on

Firstly the Mobs or Herds Add-on is required if you want to add on Individual Animal Records 

The Mobs or Herds  Add-on

You have unlimited user defined livestock Categories.  They could be livestock types: Cattle, Sheep.  Or could be Breeds: Hereford, Angus, or could be Stud, Commercials .. whatever makes sense for your set up. Many people only require one category

Within those Categories you set up Subcategories and how you set those up will depend on how you set up your categories. Some people only require one subcategory.

You create a list of Stock Classes based on: 

Sex, 

Year Born, 

Tag (how you use Tag is up to you),  

Category and 

Subcategory 

Some people use Subcategory for defining the sex of a stock classes. That is not necessary as Sex is the first part of a stock class definition, but there is nothing stopping you from doing that if that is how you want to set up your system.

Stock classes are comprised of all the animals that fit into that classification listed above. 

You can set up Stock Classes with Mixed Ages, even Mixed Sexes (e.g. you may not count the different sexes of lambs at marking time) 

Stock Classes can be re-classed as required. e.g. That mixed sex stock class of lambs would be re-classes at weaning into stock classes with a defined Sex. Or… the 1 year old females might be declassed into Breeders and Culls.

When you move mobs from paddock to paddock, you would be moving some or all of a stock class…. 

So members of a stock class can be in one or more different paddocks 

You can have one more stock classes in a paddock  (e.g.  500 of your 3 year old ewes & 10 of your 4 year old rams & all your horses).  

You would treat mobs or herds with vet treatments, feed them supplementary feeds, shear them sell them, buy them  ... each event recorded with Stock Class + Tally + Paddock.

Based on that, a lot of the reporting can be done about stock classes and paddocks 

There are various reports that analyse stocking rates, grazing pressure, grazing days per hectare (or acre) 

Individual Animal Records (IAR)

With IAR, you keep track of the individual animals within nominated (not necessarily all) stock classes. EID or VisualID or both tag types are used to track those individuals.

You record lifetime traits: e.g. eye colour, horned or not, Dam & Sire, Date of Birth, 200 day weight etc. … plus any other trait types that might change over time that you can set up as required. 

e.g. Weights, Fat Score, Fleece weight. Etc. 

You can rank animals by any of those traits, set up auto-drafting lists etc. 

You can also record the treatment of individuals, the sale or purchase price of individuals .. anything that you can record against a mob except paddock to paddock moves.  If you want to know what paddock individuals are in, you can even create a user-defined trait called Paddock and keep track of that if you like ... if all the individuals in a stock class are always together in the same paddock, then you will know their paddock due to the mob records.