Cowboys and Computers...

What's the world coming to?

Abstract

I'm going to give you some personal background that may seem irrelevant to herd management software, but I do so to help you understand the roots of Cow Sense. This software tool was born not of a need to manage pedigrees, registrations, and breed association work; not of an academic desire to gather herd performance data and compare Joe's herd to Sally's; not even with intent to sell a tool that would help others manage their own beef herds. Cow Sense was born of my own need and interest in having a tool that would help me evaluate and develop my herd so that I could survive the times and create a quality herd as quickly as possible.

Launching a Sandhills ranching operation in 1980 was a big change in my life. From a business standpoint, our timing was incredibly bad: skyrocketing interest rates, plummeting land values, and volatile cattle prices forced us to exercise all our management skills and develop new ones. The environment was completely new to me ( though my Dad and Granddad had both spent time in the Sandhills), and practices that worked well in rich Minnesota soils had to be discarded and quickly replaced with ones appropriate for the fragile Sandhills. I had spent some time in college, then worked in applied social research, and skills I had learned during that period seemed to have no direct application in my new life. At the time, I had no vision of how it might all come together down the road. I was too busy learning and applying what I needed to make that ranch work.

When I came to the Sandhills, I had never been involved with a cow/calf enterprise, and had no preconceptions about how to do it. I. wasn't a cowboy, but I was building a cow herd from scratch. I depended heavily on ideas and advice from others, but all that got mixed with my own background and analytic interests. I did things a little bit differently on our ranch than most. Part of that difference was tracking the individual performance of each cow on a personal computer, analyzing the data with various tools, then culling and selecting replacements based on that information. In 1984 I did not find software tools to help me do that, so I began building them. That was the inception of Cow Sense.

Since my first release of a commercial software product in September, 1993, I have devoted a lot of time to Cow Sense and developing a package that I could distribute reliably and widely. My commitment to Cow Sense has since led me to sell the ranch and devote myself to advancing the product and building our software business. With a stable and well-received product, we are now turning our attention to enhancements, new features, and better performance. (I say "we" because I now have associates in this enterprise.) So, let me first tell you what Cow Sense does now, and then I will describe some of our plans for the future.