Flock Metrics - Spreadsheet for tracking laying hens

A local farmer in my area created this great spreadsheet for tracking the productivity and expenses of his layer flock.  He has a few videos that explain how it works.  



Let me know what you think...

Howdy!
Welcome to Permies! I hope to see you around the forums!

What do I think ..... I have questions. I mean it looked like a great spreadsheet program and would be very useful to someone with a few thousand chickens who specialized in laying hens.

At what point would it become useful to a backyard chicken keeper? I only have about 30 birds, and am working on sending that number up, but will probably be focusing more on purebred chicks than on egg sales - if only because breaking into egg sales as a backyard or small business is difficult. So, since the price of the program wasn't discussed and I don't see much purpose in monitoring the cost per dozen eggs when I have a much simpler spreadsheet that does that for me, at what point would this program become interesting to someone?

It's got great access to all kinds of data, about how long does it take to update if you do it once a week? I only buy feed or sell eggs once a week, so ... If this were my business, I can see watching the prices of certain feed raw sales to see if I can get a few cents a pound difference, but when we're talking about less than 50 pounds weekly (still high but ...) there's not much sense in watching the futures market. And I'm not allowed to sell more than 20 dozen a week, if I could get that high in production, so ...

Could this program be used to track something other than egg sales? Maybe chicks, or meat birds, or something?
What about other types of poultry? I can see where converting over to, say, quail and quail eggs is a direct translation, but I might have missed the section that talked about calculating the cost of meat as part of the spreadsheet.
A lot of people want to raise their own meat birds and there's a lot of current interest in the difference of cost per pound for the hybrids versus heritage. There's also the holiday specialists, who focus on geese or turkeys for sale at certain times of the year.

It looks like a fun program with a lot of cross reference capabilities, and I really don't enjoy making my own spreadsheets, so this would be an interest to me except, ... with only 30 birds, there's not much call.
Looking forward to more info!

While Flock Metrics - For Egg Layers is more geared towards small farms or those selling eggs,  homesteaders can use it too. Small farms are certainly going to get more value out of it, however, homesteaders can key in on some metrics that could help them as well.

You can compare different feeds to find the one that works best for you. Some feeds are just better than others and using this tool will reveal that. This is also great for those who mix their own feeds. Even if eggs are not being sold, this can help minimize costs and maximize production, essentially making everything more cost effective.

Seeing a sudden increase in cracked eggs could mean you need to adjust calcium levels.

Knowing at what age your hens start to taper off and matching that against costs allows you to form a better plan for culling and bringing in the next generation.

Building this historical data with weather, feed, costs, breeds… ect, over the years will give you a great insight and having that information can save you a lot of time and money.

So yes, this was built for my operation as a small farmer, and really caters to that the best. That’s where it will provide the most value, but homesteaders can still find this useful.

As for raising chickens for meat, I have a sheet I use for that which is actually very slick! At my farm, my meat chickens are the centerpiece and the sheet I use for that has been invaluable! We process on farm every week for 28 weeks, just under 100 birds each week. The data I collected over the years has helped me a lot. In fact they have helped me increase revenue to just over an additional $9 per bird, which is huge.

These sheets are not really set up for breeding and selling live hens. That would be a whole different design.

I will be making videos on how to use the broiler sheets as well and make it available for download. Just haven't got that far yet.

How do I get hold of this Spreadsheet to try it out ?
Aubrey
E-mail:leseding@mail.com
Pretoria, South Africa