We just got back from our yearly Colorado Woolgrowers Convention. This is the once-per-year, two-day meeting of the sheep industry in Colorado. In addition to the regular reports on world meat and wool markets, they talk about what the US Government is doing about grazing and water rights. We also get updates on predator pressure status on the range. Plus, it’s a great time to eat lots of delicious lamb and meet with other folks!
The featured guest speaker this year was Dr. Temple Grandin, and her talk was wonderful! She spoke about the need for high-speed internet, how to engage the public in what you do, advised against having talking heads explain things, and told us to get active on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and various forums. We were also thrilled that she spent half an hour asking us about our project, LambTracker.
Every year, we get a table to display something about our farm, since we’re so different from most folks there. This year, we used our table to present information and show off the LambTracker system we’ve been developing.
LambTracker is an open-source hardware and software sheep management project that incorporates electronic identification. We’ve had many problems over the years with lost ear tags and misread tags, and last September, we decided to really pursue switching to electronic ID. We’ve developed an inexpensive EID reader (less than $100 to build) and an open-source software program that runs on Android phones and tablets. We demoed it running on a $99 Android tablet, the Nabi, in Mommy mode at the Woolgrowers Convention.
We also have a source for inexpensive EID tags from Shearwell in the UK. A single EID tag costs under $1.50 from them, including shipping! A pair of tags, one EID and one electronic, is about 13 pennies more.
Shearwell is not yet approved as an official US Scrapie program tag, but that approval is in the works. We expect them to be an official US ID within 30 days.
We were also given about 45 minutes to present our system. It was well-received, and now I’m back in the throes of development, getting the sheep database design finished, expanding the handheld software to take on our four primary tasks, writing the code to handle the conversion to EID task, and getting the desktop main software started. We’ve also got to get the EID tags installed in sheep ears soon.
My presentation, links to the source code for the demo program, and more are available at www.lambtracker.com*.
If you are a small flock considering EID, it’s worth a look.
*LambTracker is now deprecated. Please see www.animaltrakker.com for the newest version of our software.