Sheep Industry News December 2022

Producers Can Manage Sheep With New Flockwatch App H erdwatch – the market-leading farm management soft ware company used on more than 18,000 farms in the United Kingdom and Ireland – is launching its award • Capture medicine records for farm assurance; • Record lambing and track ewe performance; • Weight recording to track average daily gains; • Connect an electronic identification reader to scan ear tags and view an animal’s history or add records easily; • Map their farm to keep paddock records for nitrogen use and much more.

winning Flockwatch service in the United States. Flockwatch helps sheep farmers manage their flock in a simple, easy-to-use app, reducing paperwork and allowing them to make better decisions. Farmers who create an account before the end of the year will be able to try the new service for free for 90 days. The ‘Flockwatch by Herdwatch’ app was launched in the UK and Ireland earlier this year and has already proved hugely popular with more than 3,000 flocks already on the platform. Flockwatch also boasts some high-profile users with YouTube sheep farming superstars Sandi Brock in Canada and The Sheep Game (Cammy Wilson) in Scotland – who have 1 million followers between them – using it to manage their flocks. "The Flockwatch app is essentially an all-in-one app that I can input movements, individual sheep references and notes," Wilson said. "I can register lambs against any particular sheep, all our medicines, everything you can think of doing recording next to your sheep, you can do it on Flockwatch." Herdwatch was co-founded out of a farmer-owned cooperative in Ireland nine years ago and has made its name by delivering a simple, reliable app which saves farmers an average of three hours a week on paperwork, according to a recent member survey by the company. The new Flockwatch service will enable sheep farmers to: • Manage their flock individually or in groups;

"We are absolutely delighted to launch Flockwatch in the U.S. to help sheep farmers here make better and faster on-farm decisions," said CEO and Co-founder Fabien Peyaud. "Flockwatch is as much about monitoring flock performance as it is about compliance and helps sheep farmers manage their flocks – individually or in groups – in a simple and easy to use app. "Our company mission is simple, we are laser-focused on the digitalization of farming for the benefit of farmers worldwide in or der to make their businesses more sustainable and profitable. Up to this point anyone who wanted to manage their flock had had very little to choose from, with most relying on pen and paper. "With Flockwatch, sheep farmers now have an app at their fin gertips which will allow rapid capture of lambing, breeding, weigh ing, medicine records and more. If you think you’re not tech savvy, we are also happy for U.S. farmers to take a look for themselves to see how easy our app is to use and we’re giving all U.S. sheep farm ers this year a 90-day free trial with no commitments so they can see how easy it can be for themselves," Peyaud concluded. The Herdwatch + Flockwatch app can be downloaded for free at Herdwatch.com/download.

document all of this stuff. There’s things they need to document, and then there’s things they are required to document, but maybe not needed. How do we navigate that and make it better?" That's where the resources provided by ASI – such as the Sheep Care Guide and in formation on the AWA website – will guide producers through the process. Yes, it will take some time. And the evaluators and au ditors are there to assist you in the process. Because the audit requires a visit to the farm or ranch, Mahoney and Busch agreed that auditors will see the fruits of a pro ducer's labor, even if they need a little help documenting the process.

"It's a good standard, and it's really impor tant," Mahoney said. "It's frustrating because no one trusts you, but you're the one doing it. But they'll trust that marketing thing that's put on the internet. The trust is found more in brands than in the actual farms." And that's exactly why ASI developed the AWA program. Certification provides wool buyers and manufacturers with assurances that sheep who produced the wool were raised humanely. That assurance can then be passed along to consumers, who continue to demand more and more information about the food and fiber they purchase. Visit AmericanWoolAssurance.org to learn more.

AWA Certification Continued from Page 14

cation for most operations. "One thing I was kind of struck by, was it seemed like there was a big emphasis on written records and protocols. There was a very high level of demand of those records, reflective of what you’d find at a packing house or at a large corporation,"Mahoney said. "If this is going to be a standard for the industry, where do we draw that line? If you take a husband and wife with a family of three sitting on the Nevada desert working everyday with two or three herders, it will be really hard for them to actually go and

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