Cut your calving paperwork in half with two free apps

It's 2am. You've been in the shed since midnight. Calf is on the ground, cow is up, everything's fine. Now you need to tag it, record the birth weight, log the dam, note the calving ease score, and remember to follow up on that heifer from two nights ago whose colostrum intake you weren't happy with.

You're doing this on paper. In the dark. In wellies.

There's a better way — and it doesn't cost anything.

The two apps worth having on your phone this calving season

You don't need to go searching. You've probably already heard of one of them.

Herdwatch is the one most Irish farmers eventually land on for a reason — it was built for Irish compliance. Tagging, movement recording, medicine recording, ICBF submission. All of it syncs directly. You log the birth on your phone in 30 seconds, and it files with ICBF automatically. No double entry. No paper trail to transfer later. Just done.

The free tier covers the basics for smaller herds. If you're running more than 50 cows, the paid tier (around €180/year) is worth the maths — one avoided bureaucratic headache at inspection covers it.

AgriNet, from the Department of Agriculture, is the one people sleep on. It's free, it's official, and it handles movement notifications and herd register updates directly. Not as slick as Herdwatch, but if you want one less third-party app in your life, it does the statutory job.

The honest approach: use both. Herdwatch for daily calving records and ICBF. AgriNet as your backup for official movement compliance. Takes ten minutes to set both up.

What this actually saves you

Teagasc's calving management guidelines are clear that accurate, timely calving records directly affect your EBI data quality — which affects your breeding decisions for years. Every record that goes in late or incomplete is compounding.

Beyond the data quality argument, there's inspection risk. A BISS inspection that catches incomplete calving records is a deduction you didn't need. Both apps create a timestamped digital trail that satisfies inspectors in a way a calving book on the kitchen table often doesn't.

The big time saving comes from eliminating double-handling. You're not writing it down in the shed, then transferring it to a book, then entering it online. You do it once, on your phone, and it's filed. During peak calving, that adds up fast.

The three things to set up before your next calf hits the ground

First, download Herdwatch from the App Store or Google Play and register your herd number. Takes five minutes. Second, make sure AgriNet is on your phone and your login details are saved somewhere you can find them at 2am — not just on a Post-it in the office. Third, spend fifteen minutes doing a test entry on a calf that's already tagged so you're not learning the interface under pressure.

That's it. No complicated setup. No integration with anything else. Just two apps and fifteen minutes of prep that pays back the first time you're doing records in the dark.

What these apps don't do

Worth being straight about this: neither app will tell you when a cow is in trouble. They're record-keeping tools, not monitoring systems. For calving alerts and intervention timing, that's a different category of technology — we'll cover that separately.

They also won't fix your ICBF data if it's been inconsistent for years. That's a Teagasc advisor conversation, not an app conversation.

This article is a starting point. For decisions about herd compliance, tagging obligations, or BISS inspection readiness, always check with your Teagasc advisor or the Department of Agriculture directly. Find your local Teagasc office →

Read next: How ICBF uses your calving data — and what it means for your EBI