Why we built HerdBook

There's a red Brahman heifer at our ranch named Jelly. Everything you'll read on this site — every feature, every design choice, every quiet decision I've made about what HerdBook is and isn't — I made because of her.

Jelly was born after a very hard delivery in the pasture. She was big, and she'd been folded up so tightly inside her mother that when she came out she couldn't get her legs under her. My mom stood over her for hours, keeping the birds off, waiting.

Mom tagged in my sister and me that afternoon and we took over. The baby still wasn't up, hadn't nursed. By nightfall, we intervened. We got the mother a safe distance away — Brahmans can be sooo snarky with new babies — and my sister helped the baby to her feet. She was wobbled to and fro. Jelly-legged if you will. So we named her Jelly.

Poor girl had all of twelve hours on the ground before she found her feet which is too long with no colostrum, so we picked her up and did what we do. Filled her belly with colostrum, tucked her in for the night, and the next morning, loaded her up in the car — instead of my golden retriever — and took her to the vet. Official diagnosis: tendon laxity. Prognosis: she'd be fine if we could get her up on the reg and nursing.

So we brought her home. We brought her mother in and gave them about a week to figure out what's what. But her mother ran at us a few too many times and got herself a one-way ticket to the sale barn. (My mother has a no-a$$holes policy.) From the sale barn we stopped at the dairy and picked out Jelly a new mother — a Jersey milk cow we named Patience, because she is full of it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I remember thinking — I want to remember this. When she was born. What she had. What she came through. I wanted a record, in case anything came up later, so we would know.

We kept notes in a notebook in the house, but the notebook was never in the field when we needed it, and the notes on our phones never made it back to the notebook. We started texting each other photos of new babies as they hit the ground — soon we had hundreds, all looking basically the same. We printed them, put them in a binder with handwritten notes. The binder was never where we needed it either. In the age of a phone in every pocket, that's a sign something is wrong.

I wanted Jelly's whole life in one place. Not a spreadsheet — a spreadsheet couldn't carry what she'd been through. Not a notebook in the house that was never at our fingertips. I wanted someplace to see her face. To watch her grow. Her story. Her people. I looked around for something that would do that, and I couldn't find it. So I built HerdBook. All because of Jelly.

Everything after her — the profiles, the lineage tree, the pasture history, the photos, the fact that every cow has a face on her page and not just a tag number — is downstream of one Brahman heifer who almost didn't make it. If you're a rancher, you probably have a Jelly of your own. Somewhere on your phone, in a notebook in the house, or just in your head. This is where she goes.