Increasingly, we are utilising our smart phones on the farm.  In the last week on my iPhone I’ve consulted weather apps to decide on when to apply urea to my millet, I’ve used the level tool (hidden on the second screen of the compass) to hang a gate, looked up past emails, pulled up the soil test results (PDF saved to iBooks), used banking apps to pay bills, read market reports on the MLA app, checked elevations for water reticulation with the Google Earth app, used the calculator, accessed the data on my electronic tag wand… the list goes on.

What I want to write about today is using your smart phone to collect specific data for quality assurance system compliance such as LPA, PCAS or JBS’s Farm Assured program.

I’ve often trialled apps that address this space and/or herd management. The problem I find is that (besides generally suffering from pretty poor usability) the workflows and information architecture don’t really fit the way I think about my farm or my cattle.

For farmers, DIY is the norm – there’s not much a farmer can’t fix or make for his or her self.  This attitude can also apply to making your own data collection app using Google Drive.

Ingredients

Note: This solution requires internet access wherever you plan to use it. You might like to checkout TapForms.com if you need something to work offline.

You need to have some familiarity with using a web browser and the internet.  If you are reading this you are most likely more than qualified.

Google Drive, is many things to different people but of relevance to this article is Sheets (the spreadsheeting that is good enough to avoid buying Excel in my opinion), the form builder, and the cloud storage.  You’ll need a free Google account to access Google Drive.

While your finished form will be mobile friendly, you’ll need to create the form from a desktop size browser.

Let’s Get Started

My form is based around the data I want to collect with my app, but you can tweak your own as you see fit.  I’ve concentrated on just the livestock data as that’s the ad-hoc stuff that can occur anytime.   Other LPA information like chemical and fodder registers kind of already have their own paper trail.  Specifically, I want to capture:

• Deaths
• Treatments
• NLIS tag replacements

Once you are in Google Drive press the ‘New’ button and choose ‘form’.  Give it a relevant title.  Mine is called “Farm Assurance Form”.

One of the great features of the Forms in Google Drive is the ability to organise them into sections. Here’s how I’ve created my form.

I start by collecting any information that would apply to any of the 3 use cases.

Question: Record Description (short answer). This can be as simple as a single animals management tag or a description of a mob.

Question: Date (date). Date of the event.

At this stage you could collect other stuff relevant to you like ‘property’ (if you have more than one).

Question: Record Type (multiple choice). Options are Death, Treatment, NLIS tag replacement.

This is where (depending on the answer selected above) you get to divide your form up into different sections.  First things first, lets go and create some sections.  Look for the ‘add section’ button.

Section 2: Deaths

Question: Cause of death (short answer). This is an open text input.

After each section you get to instruct the form to either take the user to the next section, a specific section or to submit the form. In this scenario, there’s no more data collect as we have the description, date, record type of death, and cause of death.  We can select ‘submit form’.

Lets add a new section for Treatments.

Section 3: Treatments

Question: Description (short answer). This is an open ended question. An example response could be “routine worming of weaners”.

Question: Treatments (check boxes). Checkboxes allow the user to choose more than one answer. Options in my form include 5 in 1, Worms, Fluke, Veterinary, Pestiguard, Vibrovac, Other.

Question: Products Used (short answer). This is an open ended question. An example response could be “Vetmec”.

Question: Witholding Period (short answer).

Question: Export Slaughter Interval (short answer).

Again, at the end of this section we can select the option to ‘submit form’.

Add a new section for NLIS tag replacement.

Section 4: NLIS Tag Replacement

Question: Original NLIS ID (short answer).

Question: New NLIS ID (short answer).

And again, at the end of this section we can select the option to ‘submit form’.

Google Drive has been saving your work as you go so you are all done!  Use the preview button to see how it looks.

How do I and other workers on the farm access the form?

An easy way is to hit the ‘send’ button and email the form to yourself or your co-workers. Get them to look for the email on their smart phone (any breed of phone is fine) and open the form.  It will open in their phone’s web browser.  Get them to save the form (web page) to their home screen.

You can also install the “Drive” app on your smartphone and access the form from there.

Where does all the data go?

The data gets added as rows in a spreadsheet on google drive – you’ll see it in the list under “My Drive” and you can also access it from the form interface – at the top you’ll see a tab for ‘Responses’ but this view is less useful than the spreadsheet.  A this data is in the cloud, you can give permission for anyone to access it from anywhere on any device.

You can also install the “Sheets” app on your smartphone to see your data on the go.

You’ve got form

Well done – you’ve made your own farm app!

I also use forms for chemical use records and for collecting birthweight, sex, DOB and dam for my stud calves (that’s me doing exactly that in the top picture).  What else can you use forms for?