Keeping Records

For some reason my old Canon Powershot SD600 digital camera is cassé (or broken, in French).  Either that or I received a defective set of batteries and they won’t take a charge.  I’ve ordered another battery just to check, but it might be time to retire the old camera.  In the meantime, the photo quality in the posts will likely be poor and I apologize for that.  I don’t have a smart phone although having a smart phone would make the camera obsolete. 

So, to the topic of today’s post, Record Keeping.  I’m a record keeper by nature.  I just like to track things.  Although I’m not an analytical person, I track all sorts of things to see trends, to chart progress, and to observe history.  I can remember back in college in the mid to late 80’s I took graph paper and taped it to the wall of the duplex I lived in while in college and charted the daily closing price of a certain stock that I had purchased with money earned showing livestock while in junior high and high school.  It was encouraging to see a nice upward trend.  Unfortunately my forays into investing have often resulted in downward trends.  But I don’t just track stock prices, I always like to track the scores of the LSU Tiger Football team on a schedule or calendar, putting a “W” or an “L” on the side of the score.

Later, when rice farming, during harvest, I was the ‘truck man.’  That meant that I drove the trucks full of rice to the storage bins.  The combine would empty the rice into the cart and the cart emptied the rice into the truck.  I knew exactly how much rice was in each truck and printed out logs to capture this information.  This was performed for each field and when you totaled up the number of barrels of rice and divided it by the acreage, we could see the yield per acre.  By knowing the average cost of production per acre and factoring in shrinkage during drying, we could ballpark the profitability of each rice field.  This gave great information that proved helpful in decision-making.

Today, on our small homestead farm, we have numerous spreadsheets that we’ve printed and keep daily tallies of rainfall, milk production, and egg production.  I also track my inventory of seeds and chart the planting date of our vegetable crops and estimated days until harvest.  This is particularly helpful in determining when to harvest those crops you can’t see from observing – crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes and peanuts.  Although we don’t track or weigh most of our vegetable crops, we do weigh our Irish Potato and Sweet Potato production.

We also observe the days that our cows go into heat and have a calendar where we note each of their cycles.  By adding roughly 21 days (18-24 days) to the date that they go in heat, we’re able to gauge when to expose them to a bull for breeding.  This has proved to be valuable information in assisting us to properly plan in timing the transport of our cows to a bull for breeding.  Now that we have a bull, it will greatly assist us in knowing the exact date to put the girl(s) into the bull pasture.

Over the course of several years, trends become visible.  We can see the traditionally wet months and dry months.  

We can see when egg production generally spikes, plateaus, and plummets.  

We can plan the timing of our annual calf crop off of the Jersey cows.  We weigh our Cornish Cross meat birds and chart the weekly weight gain of our birds to ensure that we are butchering them at the optimal time.  Obviously, there are outliers and events that disrupt trends, but all in all, we have found that record keeping is a discipline that pays dividends.