So today is Sunday, Mother's Day. How did I spend today? Other than making this blog and fighting with technology I processed lambs. Now don't get too scared on me, I didn't turn babies into hamburgers or something equally scary out of a alien abduction movie, but on our farm when we tag new lambs we call it "processing." This may seem like an odd term but its all about getting the new lambs into our electronic database we have for our flock. Now we used to be "old school" where we wrote everything down on a piece of paper then that was rewritten onto a bigger piece of paper which was put into a ginormous binder which was then kept for the next ten years or until we lost it. And that was only if that paper got that far. See over the years our sheep have acquired an appetite for all these important papers. Just three years ago we tried a new system. This is the Alberta Lamb Traceability Project system. All your cattlemen out there probably know what I mean but this was very new to the sheep industry. Radio Frequency Identification came into play shortly after the BSE scare. This is a way for a little tag to send a radio frequency to a hand held computer so within seconds that little computer has the sheep's number, mother and father (dam and sire respectively), any health concerns, and their age all at the touch of a button. My (very old if I say so myself) father says that in his day this was only seen on Star Trek and other Science-Fiction shows or movies. Technology has come a long ways and now this is helping agriculture change! Think of it! Since the Industrial Revolution we have been using some of the same technology. Plows, Harrow and Discs are all examples of this.
In the last three years this RFID program has been spreading through the sheep industry with great results. On our farm alone we have seen a difference. Before this we would put our sheep through the shoots, try and read their sun-bleached tags, then look on that same chewed piece of paper for the corresponding tag number, now we hit a button, the Psion (hand held computer mentioned before) picks up on the frequency of the tag, and the computer pops up a number and information. A task to run through 150 ewes used to take 3-4 hours but now... about an hour. That's up to 75% faster and with a lot less mistakes! See agriculture is more than meets the eye.
Do you think that this is as cool as I do? Would you consider going into agriculture if you knew it was easier? Can you think of any careers that involve this technology along with agriculture? Would that seem like a good future for you? What is your farm doing with technology?
In the last three years this RFID program has been spreading through the sheep industry with great results. On our farm alone we have seen a difference. Before this we would put our sheep through the shoots, try and read their sun-bleached tags, then look on that same chewed piece of paper for the corresponding tag number, now we hit a button, the Psion (hand held computer mentioned before) picks up on the frequency of the tag, and the computer pops up a number and information. A task to run through 150 ewes used to take 3-4 hours but now... about an hour. That's up to 75% faster and with a lot less mistakes! See agriculture is more than meets the eye.