Animals, pedigree, events and photos — kept in plain tables you can export any time. If we disappear tomorrow, your records don't go with us.
Herd software has a habit of outliving its usefulness but not its lock-in. The file keeps opening; the sync server quietly stops answering; nobody notices for a long time.
Deer Herder was not built from a market study. It was built after a herd's records were stranded inside a proprietary file that nothing could open any more — and getting them back meant taking that format apart by hand.
Unlabelled parent fields. Events that carried no animal ID at all and belonged to whichever animal happened to precede them on disk. Records with a shifted layout that quietly put names where numbers should have been. Years of breeding history, one byte at a time.
That is the whole reason this exists, and the reason it is built the way it is. You should never have to do that.
Durability is not something you can take on trust from a vendor — every one of them says it. It has to be something you can check:
Ear tag, sex, birth year, breed and notes. Search the whole herd by tag or id, sort on any column, filter to the stock you actually run.
Dam, sire and surrogate dam on every record, drawn as a family tree that reads left to right — grandparents through to offspring, each one a click away.
Registrations, calvings, drafts, sales, purchases, deaths and treatments — dated where the record allows, and kept in order where it does not.
Take a photo in the yards and it sits on that animal's record, not in a camera roll you will never search again.
Owner, admin, member and viewer. The stock manager gets full access, the accountant gets read-only — without sharing one login between everybody.
Report a problem from whatever screen you are on. The page and device are attached automatically, so it can actually be chased down.
| Tag | Sex | Born | Breed | Dam | Sire | Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001-25 | Female | 2025 | Red Deer | 044-19 | 012-17 | 1 |
| 002-25 | Male | 2025 | Red Deer | 031-20 | 012-17 | 2 |
| 003-25 | Female | 2025 | Red Deer | 044-19 | 008-18 | 1 |
Illustrative example. Not from any real herd.
Deer Herder is in private beta. It is in daily use on a working deer farm, which is the only reason it works as well as it does — but it is not open for general sign-up, and it is not finished. Expect rough edges, and expect to be asked what you think of them.
Pricing has not been set. It will be modest and it will not be charged per animal — software that gets more expensive as your herd grows is software you end up fighting.
If you run deer and want to be part of the beta, get in touch and we will talk about whether it is a fit yet.