CALGARY – The only thing that seems to stay the same in the cattle business is how calves are born.
The rest of the story reads like science fiction where almost every move the animal makes for the rest of its life is monitored by computer.
The newest wave for the Canadian Charolais Association is the introduction of a computer service that will organize and speed up record keeping. It is the first breed association to go on-line, and computer specialist Ronda Carlson says the new program, “will save a lot of phone calls to the office.”
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Starting with about 20 herds, the system should be up and running this summer. All registered animals’ records are on file on a computer at the association’s headquarters in Calgary.
They will be moved entirely to personal computers in the office, so the information will only be a few keystrokes away.
Association members will receive a network account and should be able to register their animals via computer and call up sire performance summaries, herd evaluations and information on the commercial program called Conception to Consumer.
Daily updates
There will be a Charolais bulletin board updated daily with information. There will be a search function for farmers who are looking for information on a certain animal but don’t know the whole name or registration number.
By being able to scan records, producers will be able to see where their breed has made improvements. Producers will be able to download pedigrees, herd records like expected progeny differences and sale catalogues.
Working with the University of Georgia, sire summary data will be available on the Internet under the address www.charolais.com.
To maintain confidentiality people can only tap into information on their own animals.
“They’ll only be able to look up their own pedigrees and their own cow herd information. They don’t have access to anybody else’s information,” Carlson said.
While charges for the service haven’t been figured out, Carlson said interested people will need to buy the software program to start.
To get on the Charolais network they’ll need an IBM compatible machine with 386 K of memory with Windows and a modem. The office system has four gigabytes of storage
