Four steps, in the order you'd actually do them
Tag it once
Each animal gets a tag that is unique on your farm, then breed, age, sex, weight and where it stands. Breed lists are South African first — Nguni, Bonsmara and Drakensberger for cattle, Dorper and Dohne Merino for sheep, Boer and Kalahari Red for goats, Kolbroek for pigs, Potchefstroom Koekoek and Boschveld for poultry.
Everything points back at that tag
Vaccinations, treatments, dosing, farrier visits and vet costs attach to the animal rather than to a page in a notebook. Scheduled records are how a dosing round stops slipping, and the whole timeline is there when the vet asks what you gave and when.
Feed that follows your actual herd
Set intake per head per species and the stock you hold, and days of cover are worked out from the animals you have recorded — so the number moves when the herd does rather than when you remember to update a spreadsheet.
Reports built only from what you captured
Herd by species, average weights, vet spend, honey harvested. A section only appears once there is something real behind it. No chart stands in for data you have not recorded, and no figure is invented to fill a gap.
Bees get treated as the livestock they are
A hive is recorded like any other animal, with the hive number as its tag and the colony breed alongside it. Only the indigenous subspecies are listed — African (A. m. scutellata), Cape (A. m. capensis) and their hybrid — because honey bees are controlled goods under the Agricultural Pests Act 36 of 1983 and imported races are not farmed here.
- Inspections capture brood pattern, stores, temperament, queen sighting and varroa counts
- Harvests by product — honey, beeswax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly
- Colony events for swarms, splits, requeening, absconding and losses
- American foulbrood flagged as notifiable, because it is
A scale under a hive, read properly
Weight is the one thing that tells you what a colony is doing without opening it, and opening it sets the colony back. isibaya asks for two reference weights — the empty hive, and the hive with its colony established — because weight above an empty box is not honey. Bees, brood and drawn comb are most of it.
- Stores measured from the established colony, never from bare woodware
- Trends read from daily averages, since a hive is lighter at midday with the foragers out
- A sharp overnight loss flagged separately — a swarm, robbing, or a hive gone over
- No default starvation threshold, because what a colony needs depends on your region
Compliance you can cite
Sixty-five items across animal identification, health and biosecurity, welfare, traceability, environment and worker safety — each naming the Act it comes from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
- Animal Identification Act 6 of 2002 and its branding requirements
- Animal Diseases Act 35 of 1984 — controlled and notifiable diseases
- Meat Safety Act 40 of 2000 for anything leaving for an abattoir
- Guidance, not legal advice — and it says so