Software for heifer growers.
Mule builds growth, health and breeding-readiness tracking for heifer growers and development yards, plus the systems to hand that data back to the dairy that owns the animals and to the hauler who moves them.
What we know about heifer growers.
A development yard is holding someone else's animals and growing them to a specific target: bred, at weight, ready to go back into the milking herd. That means two audiences need the same record: your own crew feeding and doctoring the heifers day to day, and the dairy that owns them and wants to know how their animals are doing without calling the yard every week. Most yards run those on separate tracks, a feeding and health log kept at the yard, and a phone call or a text update to the owner, which is slow for both sides and easy to get out of sync.
When it's time to ship heifers back or on to the next stop, that handoff to the hauler is its own weak point too: load details passed along by phone or a scrap of paper, with nothing tying the load back to which animals actually went out.
Why a heifer grower picks Mule.
- 01Growth, health and breeding-readiness tracked per animal, not just as a yard-wide average.
- 02A portal so the dairy that owns the heifers can check status without calling the yard.
- 03EID tag capture, with a paired Bluetooth reader and manual entry when a tag won't read, so a heifer's record follows her in and back out.
- 04Field apps that work in the yard with no signal, and sync once you're back in range.
What heifer growers usually need.
From heifer growers.
Do you need signal to log a health check or a weight in the yard?
No. The field app runs offline in the yard, saves locally, and syncs once the device picks up a signal again.
Can you capture the EID tags the heifers already came in with?
Yes. We build against a paired Bluetooth reader for a fast read, with manual entry when a tag won't read. Animal RFID tags follow the ISO 11784/11785 standards, so the reads are compatible with standard EID and visual tags.
We weigh heifers on a scale head at check-in. Can that feed into the system?
If the scale head can export its data, by file, serial connection or Bluetooth, we can build the system to pull weights in directly and tie them to the individual animal instead of a paper tally.
The dairy sends us their own spreadsheet of which heifers are ours. Can you bring that in?
Yes. Importing an owner's existing animal list is part of the build, and matching it against your own intake records is exactly the kind of handoff problem we build for.
If the dairy owns the heifers, who owns the growth and health data?
You do, as the operator, with the ability to share what the owner needs through a portal. We build it for your yard; what you choose to expose to an owner's login is your call, and either way the underlying data stays yours.