Enthusiasm...It might not be contagious. Anyway, records!

When I started writing this post, I had a completely different direction in mind. However, as the post evolved, I realized that what I had originally hoped to put in a single blog post would take up the space of four individual posts. So here, I guess, is the first in a series of four posts that are probably more technical than funny. 

For each year of high school, FFA members are required to complete an SAE, or Supervised Agricultural Experience. One of my SAEs was “owning” cattle on my grandpa’s dairy farm.

(I put “owning” in quotes because it’s one of those deals where it’s on paper but doesn’t necessarily apply to real life. On paper, I “own” 20 Registered Ayrshire cattle – on the animals’ registration papers, I’m listed as the owner, along with Spring-Run Farms.)

As a Dairy Production SAE, I keep records on milk, fat, and protein production, feed expenses, births, breedings, sales, deaths – anything that has to do with one of those 20 critters is written down in the books.

At least, they’re supposed to be. What usually happens is that my advisor tells me that my books for the past year are due soon, to apply for a degree or award, and I spend the next two weeks scraping together all the records of everything that happened in the past year.

Keep in mind that this usually occurs in late December, and I haven’t kept any kind of records up-to-date since December of the last year.

It’s an efficient system, I know.

So anyhow, I’ve spent the past two days sitting at my desk in my dorm, poring over electronic milk production records, feed expenses, and birth and death records, trying to compile them so that I can get these stupid record books done.

What I inevitably end up doing, year after year, is putting together a horrid Excel spreadsheet that, if printed out, would use up all my colored ink and a full ream of paper.

So I tried a different approach this year. Yes, another spreadsheet, because there’s hardly any other way to put all that data together, but a far, far simpler one.

Well, in the future it will be simpler. It took me two days just to get production records for 7 cows put in.

What it all boils down to is that THESE ARE THE MOST AWESOME SPREADSHEETS EVER.

Have you ever downloaded or filled out a form (a tax form, or something) where you type in a number, select an option, and the form does the work for you?

THAT’S WHAT THESE DO. I AM SO EXCITED.

Here's how they work: 

A typical DHI Individual Cow Report, which breaks down each cow's individual milk production by month and then by components, looks like this:

This is a DHIA 303 Individual Cow Page. The part we're dealing with today is the boxed-in part. 

Putting those red-boxed numbers into columns in my Excel workbook, the workbook automatically turns those daily records into...

The boxed-in numbers from the first record are in the green columns. 

My spreadsheet automatically turns them into monthly figures, which is AWESOME.

MONTHLY FIGURES!

This is a huge step in the right direction, especially since I’ve got it rigged to calculate those automatically. All I have to do now is fill in those three green columns, and it translates into monthly production records.

Now, I do that for all 7 cows that are currently lactating, and it turns into this:

Do your eyes hurt? MINE DON'T!!!!

Which, to you, looks horrible, but I’m immensely proud of it…because it did that AUTOMATICALLY. And I used to have to do that by hand!

And when I do the same thing for percent protein and percent butterfat, and get big conglomerate reports like that one, I input the price per hundredweight for milk, and the price per pound for protein and butterfat, my spreadsheet tells me EXACTLY how much our farm got from those 7 cows.

I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW AWESOME THIS IS.

Actually, to try and tell you how awesome this is, let me tell you this: I never use capitals to illustrate a point. I can’t think of anytime I’ve ever done this in the history of ever. This is so awesome that I’ve used all capitals five times in this post. That’s how awesome this is.

It’s so awesome that I called my mom four times today to tell her how awesome this is.

Aside from the fact that it took me two days to put together, and it usually only takes that long to put the original records into the actual record book, in years future this will save hours and hours of work.

It’s a shame this is my last year to keep FFA records.

Although as fun as this was, I may do it next year just for kicks and giggles.

Leave a comment and let me know if you want to see this process in action. If I get a positive response, I may make a video and show you how to read DHI reports, and how my spreadsheet works.

Oh my goodness, that’s so lame. Are you even interested in DHI reports? Did this whole post bore you to death? Did you even read this far?

If nothing else, leave me a comment and let me know if my enthusiasm was laughable. Maybe even if this post was a flop, you enjoyed my raging happiness at this breakthrough.