View and print a buffalo pedigree in Farmeter Buff

A herd list tells you what you have. A pedigree tells you where each animal came from. Those are different kinds of knowledge, and the gap between them is the gap between a class register and a family photo album.

Two everyday documents help explain this post. The first is a family tree: a picture of who is whose parent, drawn back a few generations. The second is a birth certificate: a formal sheet that states who you are, who your parents are, and who issued the paper. A buffalo pedigree in Farmeter Buff is a bit of both. On screen it is a family tree you can tap through. On paper it is a report with a header, a signature line and a QR code that someone else can check.

This post follows the data from the moment you record a sire or a dam to the moment a three-generation report comes out of the printer. It is the "advanced" post in the Farmeter guides because it depends on records you make in other places (breeding, calving, external parents). If those are new to you, start with the guides on herds and breeding records first.

Why parentage matters

Breeders care about parentage because relatives share genes. FAO's guidelines on in vivo conservation of animal genetic resources define inbreeding depression as the drop in performance for a trait caused by the negative effects of inbreeding, and they explain that mating relatives raises the chance that an animal inherits two identical copies of a gene from a common ancestor (FAO, 2013, glossary, Section 6 and Box 37). Hidden recessive problems then show up more often.

The same FAO guidelines make a practical point that fits Farmeter well: the inbreeding coefficient and kinship between animals "can be easily calculated from genealogies", so FAO recommends recording the sire and the dam of every individual. It adds that the benefits of recording pedigrees, meaning only the sire and dam of each animal, generally outweigh the extra cost (FAO, 2013). Two fields per animal. That is the whole foundation.

Buyers care for a related reason. When an animal changes hands, the pedigree is the record of its background. FAO notes that most breeders' associations register animals and validate pedigrees, and that DNA validation of pedigrees can give high accuracy but is unrealistic for animals of low individual economic value and for animals raised in extensive systems (FAO, 2013, Section 5). A farm-kept pedigree is not a DNA test. It is only as good as the records behind it, which is why the last section of this post is about data quality.

Farmeter shows relationships; it does not make breeding decisions for you. The tree makes repeated ancestors visible, and what you do with that is your call (and your vet's or extension officer's).

Where the data comes from

A pedigree in Farmeter is not typed in as a picture. It is assembled from links you have already recorded. There are four sources.

1. The sire and dam on each animal. Every animal has a parentage section (ข้อมูลพ่อแม่พันธุ์ in the Thai app). If the parent is in your herd, you pick it. The app guards this link: changing a sire or dam shows a warning that it affects the animal's lineage data. And when you pick the birth date while recording a calving, the date picker notes that the available dates are limited by the sire, dam and animal data, which keeps impossible dates out.

2. External sires and dams. Plenty of buffalo have a parent that never lived on your farm: a bull from a neighbour, a cow bought at a market. The home screen's quick menu has พ่อพันธุ์ (Sire) and แม่พันธุ์ (Dam) for exactly this. The form's own hint says it records sire and dam data from external farms for use when registering offspring, with a "source" field such as a neighbouring farm or a livestock market. The pedigree viewer keeps track of which ancestors are external and labels them that way in an ancestor's details.

3. Semen records. The quick menu also has น้ำเชื้อ (Semen), a small catalogue of semen codes. When you record a mating, the sire field is "Sire / semen" (พ่อพันธุ์/น้ำเชื้อ), so artificial insemination is recorded as properly as natural mating.

4. Breeding and calving records. This is where most links get made without extra typing. A breeding cycle in Farmeter runs from heat to mating, pregnancy checks and birth. When a birth is recorded, the record can point to the calf. And when you add a new animal, the origin step offers two ways in: กรอกข้อมูลเอง (Enter manually: choose the birth date and parents yourself) or ใช้บันทึกการผสมพันธุ์ (Use breeding record: prefill from a recorded mating). The second option is the one to prefer: the dam and the sire or semen come from a record you already made, so there is nothing to mistype.

                                                            
 ┌──────────────────────┐                                   
 │ BREEDING RECORD      │                                   
 │──────────────────────│          ┌──────────────────────┐ 
 │ heat    [x]          │          │ NEW CALF  B-15       │ 
 │ mated   [x]          │          │──────────────────────│ 
 │ check   [x] preg     │          │ dam     B-07         │ 
 │ born    [x]          │ ········>│ sire    S-12         │ 
 │ dam     B-07         │          │                      │ 
 │ sire    S-12         │          │ from breeding record │ 
 └──────────────────────┘          └──────────────────────┘ 
                                                            
                                          \^/ ,~~~~.        
                                          (o)(      )~      
                                              `----'        
                                              ||  ||        

Viewing the tree

Open any animal and you'll find a row of tabs: กายภาพ (physical data), สุขภาพ (health), การผสมพันธุ์ (breeding, shown where it applies), ไทม์ไลน์ (Timeline) and a tab with a small tree icon labelled พันธุ์ประวัติ (pedigree). Older screenshots, like the one below, show fewer tabs and label the pedigree tab ผังตระกูล, "family tree".

Timeline and pedigree are plan features. On the Farmeter Buff page the comparison table lists "Timeline" and "View Pedigree" (ดูพันธุ์ประวัติ) as included from the Growth plan up, with dashes for Free and Standard. On a plan without them, the tab shows a lock and a prompt to upgrade to see the ancestor generations.

A few things to know once you're inside:

• Empty tree? If the animal has no parents recorded yet, the app says so and suggests adding the sire and dam to start a family tree.
• Parents and children. When the animal has offspring, the viewer shows two buttons, พ่อแม่ (parents) and ลูก (n) (children, with a count). Parents mode looks back; children mode looks forward at the animal's offspring.
• Fullscreen. Trees get wide quickly, so there is a fullscreen button.
• Tap a card to open that ancestor. In the printable layout, a tap opens a details panel with sex, birth date, ID tags, its own sire and dam, and whether it is an external ancestor.

The same viewer is shared: the Farmeter Buff web app, the Farmeter Cooperative portal and Farmeter Beef all show pedigrees through it, with species-specific titles and placeholder portraits. Farmeter Beef is in Beta and open to partner farms only.

From links to a three-generation layout

Here is the part I like most. A family tree drawn by hand tends to shrink when information is missing: if you don't know a grandmother, you just don't draw her, and everything shifts. That makes two trees hard to compare.

The certificate layout avoids this with an old genealogists' trick, the Ahnentafel numbering: the animal is number 1, the sire of any number n is 2n and the dam is 2n+1. So the sire is 2, the dam is 3, the sire's sire is 4, and so on up to 15 for the eight great-grandparents. Every ancestor has a fixed seat whether or not it is known.

SELF          PARENTS         GRANDPARENTS    GREAT-GP          
                                                                
                                        ┌─────B-05 M¹           
                          ┌───B-12 M ───┤                       
                          │             └─────B-08 F            
           ┌──SIRE B-61 ──┤                                     
           │              │             ┌─────B-17 M            
           │              └───B-30 F ───┤                       
           │                            └─────B-21 F            
[B-104 F] ─┤                                                    
           │                            ┌─────B-05 M¹           
           │              ┌───B-41 M ───┤                       
           │              │             └─────B-26 F            
           └──DAM  B-77 ──┤                                     
                          │             ┌─────B-33 M            
                          └───B-55 F ───┤                       
                                        └┄┄┄┄┄[ none ]          
                                                         ▛▜▚▞▛▜ 
¹ same ancestor, twice                            QR ▸   ▞▚▙▛▞▚ 
[ none ] no record, slot kept                            ▙▟▞▚▙▟ 

That fixed-seat design gives the report three useful habits:

1. Up to three ancestor generations. Parents, grandparents and great-grandparents: 14 ancestor slots plus the animal. The column headings in Thai read ตัวเอง (self), พ่อแม่ (parents), ปู่ย่า / ตายาย (paternal and maternal grandparents) and ทวด (great-grandparents), and each card carries its relation, such as พ่อ, แม่, ปู่, ย่า, ตา, ยาย.
2. Missing ancestors keep their positions. An unknown slot shows ไม่มีข้อมูล ("no data") instead of collapsing, so you can see at a glance which branch needs work.
3. Repeated ancestors share a footnote. If the same animal fills more than one slot (one bull who is both a paternal and a maternal great-grandfather, say), each of its cards gets the same superscript number, and a line under the report lists the repeated ancestors by name. FAO's point was that relatedness can be worked out from genealogies; here a shared ancestor is simply visible on the paper.

A field-by-field tour of the certificate

The printable layout is a green A4 report. From top to bottom:

The QR codes are generated in the page itself. If the issuer provides a web verification address, the QR opens that page ("scan to verify the document"). If not, the QR simply encodes the reference code, and the caption says so. That honesty matters: a QR on a certificate shouldn't pretend to verify anything when there is no page behind it.

                  ┌───~~─────────────────────┐                  
                  │FARM NAME          ▛▜▚▛▜  │                  
                  │PEDIGREE REPORT    ▙▟▞▙▟  │                  
                  │──────────────────────────│                  
                  │B-104 · F · photo [■]     │                  
                  │       ┌ B-61 ┬ B-12      │                  
                  │ B-104 ┤      └ B-30      │                  
                  │       └ B-77 ┬ B-41      │                  
                  │              └ [    ]    │                  
                  │BREEDER   OWNER    FARM   │                  
                  │  —         —        —    │                  
                  │                          │                  
                  │SIGNED ____________ (✓)   │                  
                  │                          │                  
                  │DOC CODE · VERIFY BY QR   │                  
                  │                          │                  
            ▗▄▄▄▄▟▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▙▄▄▄▄▖            
            ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐            
            │  ○  READY                     A4     │            
            └──────────────────────────────────────┘            

Two print details are worth knowing. The print stylesheet sets an A4 portrait page with 10 mm margins and keeps the colours, and the pop-up details dialog is hidden on paper. Photos are optional: turning them off hides the animal portraits but keeps the farm logo, the signature image and the QR codes.

Generate Pedigree: the paper version as a service

The Farmeter Buff page lists pay-per-use add-on services for Growth plans and above, and two of them are about pedigrees: Generate Pedigree (สร้างใบพันธุ์ประวัติ, a pedigree sheet) and Generate Customized Pedigree (a sheet formatted for an individual farm). Both are charged per sheet created successfully; failed jobs and system retries are not charged, and the total is shown before you confirm. Prices are on that page.

Data quality: one wrong tag breaks a branch

Because the tree is built from links, a single wrong link moves a whole branch. Pick the wrong dam for a calf and the calf inherits that cow's mother, grandmother and great-grandparents, all wrong, all looking official. A few habits help:

• Prefer "Use breeding record" when you add a calf, so its parents come from a mating you already logged.
• Check the tag before you save. Two animals with similar tags (B-104 and B-140) are the classic mix-up.
• Record outside parents as external sires and dams rather than leaving the field empty. An empty parent is an honest gap; a guessed one is a wrong branch.
• Read the warnings. When the app says that changing a sire affects lineage data, it affects that animal's tree and the tree of every descendant.
• Look for the footnote numbers. If an ancestor appears twice and you didn't expect it, that is either useful knowledge or a recording mistake. Either way it is worth a look.

The same rules apply in Farmeter Beef, which shares the viewer. A pedigree is a promise about the past, and it is only as trustworthy as the person keeping the records. The software's job is to make keeping them easy and to show plainly what is known and what isn't.

Sources

• Farmeter Buff product page (features, plan comparison, Generate Pedigree), Farmeral Technology
• Farmeter Beef product page (Beta, partner farms only, pedigree tracking), Farmeral Technology
• Farmeter Buff on the App Store
• Farmeter Buff on Google Play
• FAO (2013). In vivo conservation of animal genetic resources. FAO Animal Production and Health Guidelines No. 14 (overview)
• FAO (2013). In vivo conservation of animal genetic resources, full PDF (glossary, Section 5, Section 6, Box 37)
• Ahnentafel (genealogical numbering system), Wikipedia