Happy New Year! We wrapped up 2023 with a few new features that should help you better take care of your plants, animals, and business operation overall. You'll find improvements to livestock feedings, measurements and groups, and updates to crop treatments. We've also added more accounting system enhancements with a brand new feature for annual budgeting.
Budgeting
As we move into a new calendar year, you'll now see a new section for Budgets under the Accounting tab. Farmbrite's Budget tool helps you forecast your income and budget for expenses, and show you how you're doing along the way. You can define monthly budgets and expectations for any of your financial categories, and also see your totals across them as well.
Livestock Feeding and Measurement Improvements
We've added a new feature for you to distribute your livestock group feedings by weight. If the animals in your group are not similar in age and weight, splitting a feeding evenly on each record might not account for how much each animal actually ate. That can be critical for calculating average daily gains, and cost of feed per animal. Selecting the new option to distribute by animal weight will take the animals current weight into consideration when splitting the total amount fed. It uses the animals' percentage of the total group weight to determine the amount they ate out of the feeding total. While we're talking about group feedings, we also added the ability to delete them from the group, instead of having to delete them individually. This can help save time in case you make a mistake with a large feeding.
You also have a new field to calculate the average daily gain of an animal since the last time they were measured. You can find it under the measurements section of your livestock records. This is useful for tracking their most recent growth, helping you spot illnesses or verify the effectiveness of new feed or supplements.
Crop Treatment Enhancements
When you record treatments for your crops, you'll now have a field to add a number days until a withholding period ends. In case the treatment you applied needs time to dissipate prior to harvesting, you'll now be able to set a countdown for the withdrawal period. This will also automatically set a task and schedule reminder for the date as well. This field can also be added to custom reports if you'd like to see it for all of your treatments across various crop types too.
Archiving Smart groups
You also now have the ability to archive smart groups. This helps to clean up your list of livestock groups after you've sold or butchered a herd. You can check a box on the group to mark it archived, and they will be retained under the new Archived tab in your group list. Archived smart groups retain their data, so you can always browse their past feedings, measurements, etc. by accessing the group from that tab. The groups are removed from filters once archived, so you won't see them as selections when filtering pages and reports.
Reach out to us if you have any questions about using any of these features!