Farm record keeping is dated to the ancient times, and it’s a practice that always help farmers to increase their productivity.
There is so much importance of farm records and accounts in managing a farm or any animal production.
What is Farm Record Keeping?
Farm records is a pull of information kept or computed consistently over a period of time on a different aspect of livestock production.
The process of putting down data about the whole activities of your farm is referred to as farm record keeping.
Characteristics of Good Farm Records
A farm record should be well designed, not aesthetically, but to be able to keep information safe.
A farm manager is expected to design a farm suitable to these needs, although there are many record and tract available
Some infomation may not necessarily be suitable all time because they may include irrelevant information on such records.
It is, however, becomes necessary for a farm manager to design his or her specific records employing the following guidelines.
- Make a list of all information to be put on the record
Decide on the useful one among the list. if the list is too long, break it into two or three convenient related parts.
It is not a good idea for a record chart or farm to have too much information because such information is usually too labor fill and sometimes, untidy on the table chart.
- The information should not be more than ten and the last column should be reserve for remarks except when necessary.
- Provide a heading or a title for the record: Every record must have a title; for example, egg production record, vaccination record, cattle record
- Ensure that all information on this record is related to the title of the record.
Types of Farm Records
There are different types of farm records since farm record keeping encompasses all the aspects of your animal production.
You can have a ledger where you keep each of these types of farm records. The most important is to keep records of the full activities of your farm.
Examples of Farm Records
Inventory record
You should keep records of your farm assets and their values, and this falls under your farm inventory records.
The inventory record should also have columns for different forms of inventories.
For example, your Livestock population, stock purchase and disposal records, and stock inventory record
Production record
Your farm production record could be taken daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, for example.
In this record, you can pen down your milk production, meat production, egg, wool production etc.
Farm Feed record
You should keep information about the feed you purchase, feed disposal, Roughage production, that is silage, pasture land.
Penchat record
These are a chat of daily information or stock population, feed consumption, breeding position, and important occurrences.
Breeding records
These include mating and production records of different animal
Vaccination record, treatment record, weighing record, castration record, parasite control record, for example, dipping, spraying, dusting etc.
Marketing and account record
Under this category, you should have the culling, purchase record capital record, record of the payment of workers, and even your budget record.
Maintenance and repair record
You should have records for the farm and farm house maintenance, staff or labor records, for example, the individual staff record, staff utilization, wages, promotion and staff wellfare.
What are the Importance of Farm Records?
Record help to keep proper inventory of stock ( both birds and livestock) and the monitoring of farm equipment and consumables on the farm as well as check losses.
The importance of farm record keeping in animal production can not be over-emphasized.
Through the farm records, a farmer would be able to know whether a livestock project is making a profit or not.
Updating of your farm account is usually done by going through the farm record.
The record serves as a pull of information from which research data can be collected or facts for writing history on the farm.
Base of profit and loss account record help in making a decision whether to expand, maintain or reduce the scale of production.
Farm records are equally used by banks in granting loans.
