The medicine book the vet asks to see
When the vet, the assurance assessor or the milk buyer's inspector asks to see the medicine book, it comes out of a drawer in the farm office. The early pages are neat. The recent ones have gaps: a batch of ewes wormed last month with no batch number written, a lame cow treated by the relief milker with no dose recorded, a bottle of antibiotic opened but no animals listed against it.
Everyone knows treatments happened. The empty bottles are in the bin. The problem is that treatments happen in the field, at the crush, in the parlour pit and in the lambing shed, often by whoever is there, and the book stays in the office.
Why treatments go unrecorded
The usual reason given is that people forget. The underlying reason is that recording a treatment properly needs details that are not to hand where the treatment happens.
| Detail the record needs | Where it is at the time of treatment |
|---|---|
| Product name and batch number | On the bottle, which is sticky and in someone's hand |
| Animal or group identity | Ear tag, in a race full of moving animals |
| Dose and route | In the person's head, or on the label |
| Who administered it | Obvious at the time, forgotten a week later |
| Withdrawal dates | Worked out from the label or the vet's instructions |
| Where the medicine came from | On a delivery note or vet invoice in the office |
Group treatments are the hardest. Dosing three hundred lambs through a race produces one line in the book in theory, but that line needs the batch number, the group identity and the date, and nobody writes it while holding a drenching gun.
Relief staff and family members who help at busy times also treat animals, and they are the least likely to know where the book lives or how you like it filled in.
What a patchy medicine record costs the farm
Medicine records are part of what your assurance scheme, your milk or meat buyer and the authorities expect to see. The detailed requirements are theirs, and your vet and your assurance body are the right people to ask about them. We do not interpret them. What we see is the admin side: filling gaps from memory before a visit is stressful and not very reliable.
There is also a direct business cost. Withdrawal dates matter when animals are sold or milk goes in the tank, and if the record is missing, the person loading the lorry or switching the milk line cannot check. Stock of medicines drifts too. Nobody knows how much wormer is left in the store, so you either run out at the wrong moment or buy more than you need.
And when you want to talk to your vet about how much antibiotic the farm uses, or which groups are treated most, a book with gaps gives an unreliable answer.
How we build treatment recording that happens at the crush
What we build is a treatment record designed to be filled in at the point of treatment in under a minute, feeding a clean medicine record the office can print or export.
- A medicine stock list: each product, pack and batch you have in store, added when it arrives from the delivery note or vet invoice. A photo of the invoice can be read automatically to save typing, with a person confirming.
- At treatment, the person picks the product from the stock list (or scans its barcode), which fills in the batch. They pick the animal by tag or scan, or choose a group, and enter dose and route.
- Withdrawal periods are entered once per product from the label or from your vet's written instructions, by you. The system then calculates the dates for each treated animal or group. It does not decide the withdrawal period itself.
- A 'do not sell or supply' list shows every animal or group still inside a withdrawal date, on the phone and in the office, so the person loading a lorry can check it.
- Each week the office sees opened products with no treatments recorded against them, treatments with missing details, and stock running low.
- The medicine record is a clean report, by date, animal and product, that you can print for the book or show on screen.
Relief staff get their own login so the record shows who treated what, without them needing to know the office system.
The day after a big dosing session
On Tuesday the whole lamb crop is wormed through the race. Before starting, the shepherd picks the wormer from the stock list on a phone clipped to the hurdles, selects the group, enters the dose rate, and taps save once the group is done. The batch number came with the product. The withdrawal date appears on the do-not-sell list straight away.
On Wednesday the relief milker treats a lame cow in the parlour and records it on his phone before the next cows come in. On Friday the office sees one bottle of antibiotic opened on Monday with no treatment against it, asks the stockman, and adds the missing entry while it is still fresh. When the vet comes for the annual review, the record is on screen, complete, with product totals for the year.
Does your medicine record look like this?
- The medicine book lives in the office and treatments happen everywhere else.
- Batch numbers or doses are sometimes missing from entries.
- Relief staff or family treat animals and do not always record it.
- Nobody can quickly say which animals are still inside a withdrawal date.
- You fill in gaps from memory before a vet or assurance visit.