Cull/Beef Animals
You can create a list of animals for potential culling and then send that list to your mobile device, rather than printing a paper copy of it. To do so, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Define your culling parameters
There are numerous factors you can choose from when selecting animals to cull, such as high days in milk (DIM, low milk production, animals that aren't pregnant, and so on).
Start by creating a list in DairyComp containing the parameters you consider important for culling. For example:
SHOW ID PEN LACT DIM RPRO MILK PMILK SCC TBRD FOR LACT>0 DIM>200 DCC<50
The above command has several parameters commonly used for identifying animals for potential culling, such as days in milk (DIM), times bred (TBRD), and somatic cell count (SCC). The FOR statement qualifies which animals to include on the list.
Depending on the size of your herd, your first attempt at producing a list of animals to cull might yield too many animals. If that's the case, adjust the parameters of your command to pare the list down to a management number of animals. The ultimate goal of this list is to go and inspect the animals in the field, so pare the number down enough to make that task reasonable.
Once you have your list of animals you can simply print it out; to make it more useful you'll probably want to send it to a mobile device. If so, proceed to the next step.
Step 2: Set a custom item value for each animal on the list
In order to send your list of animals to your mobile device (for example,Pocket CowCardfor Android or DC on Mobile), you'll need to "set" a specific, custom item for each animal on the list. This item might already be set for your DairyComp system, but if not you can set a new item using the ALTER\2 command.
For our example, we'll use an item named PCCB (for Pocket CowCard and Beef). (PCCB is a type 1 item, created using ALTER\2). And we will set a value for this item for every animal we want on our cull list. To do that, we'll use the criteria we used to create our list in step 1, above: FOR LACT>0 DIM>200 DCC<50
So to set our PCCB item for all of the animals that meet our criteria, we'll execute the following command:
PCC=1 FOR LACT>0 DIM>200 DCC<50
This means that we'll set the PCCB to a value of 1 for every animal with a lactation (LACT) greater than 0 (zero), days in milk (DIM) greater than 200, and days carried calf (DCC) less than 50. Now, if we were to enter the following command, we would see our list of animals:
SHOW ID FOR PCCB=1
How can I clear an item from an animal?
You can clear an item at any time using the =. FOR xx command. For example, to clear our PCCB item, we would enter the following:
PCCB=. for <>.
In this case, the <> clears the PCCB for every animal that had that item previously set. If you were to enter just PCC=. (i.e., without the greater than/less than signs), the system would prompt you for the ID number(s) of the animal(s) you want to clear.
Step 3: Send the list to your mobile device
Use the SERVER command to send your list of cull animals to a mobile device (such as PCC or the DC on Mobile app). For example:
SERVER ID FOR PCCB=1\K
Remember, we've already set the PCCB item to 1 for the animals we want included in our cull list, so executing the above command sends that list to our mobile device.
The \K switch informs the system to prompt for individual animal ID numbers.
To create a custom command in DairyComp to run a SERVER string , start the command with a Z, as in:
ZBEEFL = SERVER ID FOR PCCB=1\K