February 2024

Meet Simon Brown
Simon farms in Co. Kilkenny, Ireland where he has a commercial flock and a flock of over 160 pedigree ewes made up of three different breeds; namely Charollais, Texel and Shropshire sheep.  Simon is a member of Sheep Ireland and has been recording with them since the scheme began, so there are a lot of records to keep and information to gather.

An Agrident 250 reader is used on the farm.  Often this is used as an input device for the Sheep Ireland app.  The reader connects to Simon’s phone via Bluetooth.  However, for some events such as weighing, selling and pregnancy scanning, Simon finds it is so much faster and less error prone to record directly into his Agrident reader. When the reader reads the tag, there are no mistakes and it reads it instantly. The Agrident readers allow users to record the complete management cycle for sheep from births through to deaths and everything in between.  Agrident readers supplied by TGM come prepopulated with the sheep recording software and a free windows program ‘AgriDataTransfer’ downloads all recorded data from reader to PC.
AgriDataTransfer creates a file for Sheep Ireland which includes the 3 event types, weighing, selling and pregnancy scanning. Speed and accuracy are the issue for these events and direct input into the reader is faster than working on a phone, especially on a wet miserable day.  With all the weighing data needed Simon found it so much quicker to run the sheep through the scales using the reader connected to the scales and sending the file to Sheep Ireland to be uploaded.
Simon also uses AgriDataTransfer to set alerts on sheep that he wants to draft out, for example setting an alert for ewes to be culled, ewe lambs to be kept and certain requirements for customers looking for rams. Simon finds that using the phone is great for recording lambing details as the ewes are in a pen and easy to read, while using the reader is better for recording bigger numbers when weighing, selling, pregnancy scanning and finding sheep with the alert setting.