FarmIT 3000 - Sheep Working With EID.

The electronic tagging of sheep has been with us now for over a decade and during that time thousands of tags have been read and data collected about the animals. EID works and EID readers work, however that does not mean it works for you and the information you want to record. From an official point of view little has changed, sheep tend to be read at markets and slaughter, the majority of farmers do not use EID.

Given reading the tag is normally the start of the data recording process, it is often what happens after the eid tag is read that cause you the problem. For example recording a treatment needs much more user input than simply getting a list of tags. So it is the collection of the associated data and how easy that is for you to do that defines your experience of EID.

Try to remember that the electronic reading of the tag is exactly that, it saves you wiping the mud off and putting your glasses on, after the tag is read what happens next depends on the job you are doing. Print a list of Tags or record a lambing event. If farmers have been frustrated with EID, it is because the post EID reading data collection routine was not or did not do what th e farmer needed or wanted to do. This is also why EID readers have become more complex and attempted to do more.

SYSIWYG - What you see is what you get

Shearwell SDL400

Shearwell SDL400 displaying the sheep tag in visual UK format. IT is also showing the group and count of animals.

The EID in a sheep tag is what you have printed on the outside, with the country code UK represented by the ISO standard country code 826 in the EID number.

It is therefore very easy to convert the EID into a readable form, that is the ear tag number

0826071573300056 becomes UK0715733 00056

FarmIT 3000 is designed to work with EID and uses the tag number as the  main identifier for the animal. I.E. its Ear Tag Number (ETN), it also has an EID but this will be the same as the ETN and may be left blank.

EID Readers and FarmIT 3000

Of course if you are using an EID reader to read tags and want to do more than simply print a list the next question is what do you do with it?

Turning your list of tags into a meaningful record of farm movements or vet and med records is not the job of the hand held reader, or the software that may have come from a global manufacturer. It is of course specific to the UK and could be specifc to England (LIS), Scotland (Scot EID) and Wales (EIDCymru). This is the role of the farm management software and of course how that works depends on the programers who produce it and the target market they are working with.

When downloading data from EID readers or weigh heads FarmIT 3000 automatically takes care of the EID and converts it to the ETN format above. It does this to make life simple and also check for duplicate sheep. Howvever to ensure this works it is very important to work with the default format.

Breed Societies

Many breed societies have been slow to move to the official identifier and still use society numbers. We suggest you enter your sheep into FarmIT 3000 using the UK tag number and then use the Pedigree Number as the society number.