Livestock Record Keeping App: Herdwatch vs AgriWebb AI Voice Notes

Choose by how records get captured, not by brand. AgriWebb's Farm Diary takes typed or dictated notes and turns them into draft records you confirm, and it works offline. Herdwatch's Herdi answers questions from your records, but I could not confirm spoken record entry. A plain notes app works if you copy notes across weekly.

The honest answer for most small livestock enterprises is a two-step routine: talk into the phone where you stand, then check what the app or AI made of it before it becomes a record. Whichever app you pick, the saving comes from not rewriting at the kitchen table, and the risk comes from not reading the draft.

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What the two apps actually offer for voice

These are two products with different strengths, and the headline comparisons online blur them together. Both are built for cattle and sheep keepers; each runs on a phone and works offline, and each is aimed at record-keeping and compliance.

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AgriWebb Farm Diary. AgriWebb's help article describes the Farm Diary as an AI-powered whole-farm diary for capturing records on the move. You open it from the home screen or the green action button, then type or dictate a note. The app drafts records from the note. According to the article it can create livestock, pasture, cropping and opening-gate records, but not tasks or rainfall records yet. You can select animals by location, age class or management group, but not yet by electronic or visual tag number. Dictation uses the microphone on your phone keyboard, so you dictate into the note and then edit the text. If the app cannot match a note to a record type it says "No match", and you can edit the note or add the record by hand. It works offline, creating drafts when you next sync. The article says it is available on all plan types, though a feature of this kind may change, so look at the current article.

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Herdwatch and Herdi. Herdwatch is a long-established herd and flock record app with cattle, sheep and pasture solutions in one app. Its site says it works offline and syncs later, that it works with Bluetooth electronic tag readers and scale heads, and that its support team can enter a whole flock for you, while on some regional sites cattle can be synced from the official registration system. Herdi is its AI assistant, and Herdwatch's own pages describe it as answering questions from your own farm data in seconds. Trade-press coverage around its 2025 launch said farmers would be able to speak into their phone to record daily tasks, with parts of that described as coming soon. I found no current Herdwatch page confirming that you can speak a new calving, treatment or movement and have it saved as a record, so ask support to demonstrate it on your version before assuming it.

In short: AgriWebb's documented voice feature is about creating records from notes, and Herdwatch's documented AI feature is about asking questions of records you already have. They solve different halves of the job.

What each costs, and why there is no price table here

Neither vendor publishes a flat price. Herdwatch gives a quote based on farm type and herd size, offers a free digital calving book and a 30-day free trial of its paid plans, and runs seasonal first-year discounts (a half-price first year was on offer in November 2026). AgriWebb prices per head of cattle and sheep through a calculator on its pricing page, in three tiers (Essentials, Compliance and Performance), with audit and biosecurity tools, treatment and weight records, and breeding records spread across them; its trial needs no credit card, and it too was running a first-year discount. Treat any promotion as year-one only and ask for the year-two price. Put your own numbers in each calculator and write down the annual figure. A quote for 60 ewes and one for 600 are different conversations.

When you compare, ask three further questions. Does the price include every person who records, such as a part-time helper or a family member? Does it include the electronic tag reader integration you already own? Is the quote an introductory price that rises in year two?

The plain notes app route, and when it wins

You can build a perfectly decent system from tools already on your phone. Record a voice memo as you work, let a transcription tool or AI chat turn it into a table, then enter the result into whatever you use for your official record. The cost is zero to about $20 a month for a chat subscription, and it works with any record system you already have.

It wins when you have a small enterprise, when your compliance record sits in a government or assurance portal you cannot replace, or when you only want to stop forgetting what you did. It loses when several people must see the same live record, or when you want reports on weights and breeding.

A typical routine looks like this. Say a flock owner with 180 ewes records in the field using a phone's voice memo app. In the evening they paste the transcript into an AI chat with a fixed prompt and get a table. They check it line by line against the tag numbers on their hand-held list and enter the confirmed rows. Ten minutes a day replaces forty.

You are helping me keep sheep treatment records. Turn this voice-note
transcript into a table with these columns: date, animal or group,
what happened, product used, dose, batch number, withdrawal period,
who did it. Use only what is in the transcript. If a field is missing,
write MISSING. Do not guess tag numbers or doses. List any line you
were unsure about under the table.

Transcript:
[paste transcript here]

An illustrative result, from a transcript that said: "Tuesday morning, drenched the twin-bearing ewes in the top field, thirty-two of them, used the usual wormer, can't remember the batch."

| Date    | Group                    | What happened | Product | Dose    | Batch   | Withdrawal | By      |
| Tuesday | Twin-bearing ewes, top field (32) | Drenched | "the usual wormer" | MISSING | MISSING | MISSING | MISSING |

Unsure: "the usual wormer" is not a product name; the date says
"Tuesday" with no calendar date.

The AI did the right thing by marking the gaps rather than filling them. Your fix is to open the product's packaging, add the name, dose, batch and withdrawal period, and change "Tuesday" to a date. If the AI had returned a confident product and batch, that would have been invented, and it would be a reason to change the prompt.

A worked comparison for a mixed herd and flock

Take a hill farm with 60 suckler cows and 250 ewes, one full-time farmer and one part-time helper. Records needed: calving, treatments, movements on and off, lambing, tagging and weights. Today these live in a calving book, a diary and scraps of paper.

Illustrative time sums. Writing up from memory each evening costs about 40 minutes a day in busy periods such as calving and lambing, and perhaps 10 minutes the rest of the year. Over a year, say 90 busy days and 275 quiet days: 90 x 40 + 275 x 10 = 6,350 minutes, about 106 hours. A voice-first routine that cuts the busy-day figure to 15 minutes and the quiet-day figure to 5 would take 90 x 15 + 275 x 5 = 2,725 minutes, about 45 hours. The saving is 61 hours a year. At $25 an hour of the farmer's time that is $1,525, which you set against the app's annual quote. These are guesses, so time yourself for a week before relying on them.

The result depends on the animals. Both apps handle individual animals and electronic tags in their main record screens; AgriWebb sells separate individual-animal and mob trials. The difference for voice capture is narrower: AgriWebb's Farm Diary selects animals by location, age class or management group, not by tag number. So a suckler herd recorded cow by cow gains less from the Farm Diary and more from a tag reader, which points to Herdwatch's strengths, while a flock managed in mobs, such as ewes in groups by field, matches the Farm Diary's group selection well. Mixed enterprises should put their biggest time-waster, not their biggest animal count, first.

Seven checks before you pay for either

1. Region. Does the version you would sign up for support your animal identification and movement reporting scheme? Herdwatch runs separate regional sites, so confirm which one applies to you. For AgriWebb, ask support to confirm your scheme and your language for dictation, since the Farm Diary page does not say which languages work.
2. Offline. Both say they work offline. Test in the worst field you have, in airplane mode, then sync in the yard.
3. Voice in practice. Record a real note in the wind, with a dog barking. Dictation that works in the kitchen may fail by the race.
4. The draft. Does the app show a draft for you to confirm, or does it save straight away? A draft step is the feature that stops a mistake becoming a record.
5. Export. Can you take your data out as a spreadsheet or file if you leave? Ask support in writing.
6. Who else enters data. Does a part-time helper need a paid seat, and can you limit what they can edit?
7. Audit acceptance. Ask your assurance scheme or buyer whether records from this app are accepted as they are.

Where voice notes go wrong on a farm

Three failures turn up repeatedly in practice. The first is numbers: dictation turns "four-two-seven" into "427" or "forty-two seven", so a tag number or dose is wrong while the sentence looks fine. Always read numbers aloud again against the animal or the bottle. The second is names: product and field names are not in a speech model's vocabulary, so a brand name such as a wormer may arrive as something else, and "Top Meadow" may become "top meadow" or "top medal". Keep a short list of your product and field names and check the draft against it. The third is silence: a note recorded in a noisy shed with half the sentence missing produces a record that looks complete. If a draft says "No match" or leaves a field blank, believe it and fix the note.

These are reasons to keep the confirm step, not reasons to avoid voice. A farmer who checks six drafts each evening still spends less time than one who writes everything up from memory, and the check catches the errors dictation makes. The tutorial on spray records from voice notes shows the same checking routine for chemical logs, where the stakes are higher.

Building the notes route in four steps

If you take the notes route, a few habits make it work. This is the set-up I would use on a small holding, and it costs nothing beyond the phone.

1. Speak in a fixed order. Date, group or animal, what you did, product, dose, anything odd. A script cuts the missing fields, and it takes a week to become automatic.
2. Name the group before the count. "Twins, top field, thirty-two" transcribes better than "thirty-two of them in the top".
3. One memo per job. A single long memo covering the whole morning gives the AI more room to mix up animals.
4. Process daily. Paste the day's transcripts into the prompt at the same time each evening, so the memory of the day is still fresh when you check the table.

A spoken note that follows the script, as an illustration, would run: "Fourteenth of March. Ewe tag ending 427, lamb one, navel treated with iodine, no further action." The same facts without the script would be "Did a lamb in the shed earlier, navel, the usual." The first gives the AI a date, an animal, an action and a product. The second gives it nothing to build a record from, and a good prompt will mark nearly every field MISSING.

A second prompt for calving and lambing weeks

Birth records have different fields from treatments, and busy weeks produce a pile of short notes. This prompt asks for births only and sets the AI to flag problems rather than smooth them over.

From the transcripts below, list every birth. For each one give: date,
dam tag (as spoken), number born, sex of each, birth weight if mentioned,
assisted or unassisted, any treatment given, and any issue. Use only what
is said. If a dam tag could be heard two ways, list both and mark the
line CHECK. At the end, add a count of births by day and list any day
where the count in my notes does not match the count in the table.

Transcripts:
[paste transcripts here]

An illustrative output for two of the notes would give two rows, one marked CHECK because the dam's tag was spoken as "four-two-seven" and could be 427 or 42 and 7, and a daily count line reading "14 March: notes mention 3 births, table shows 2". That last line is the useful bit. It catches the note you forgot to transcribe, which is the commonest way a record goes missing.

Fixing a dictation error: before and after

Here is what a corrected draft looks like, using AgriWebb-style drafts and any similar app. Illustrative.

Dictated note: "Moved the ninety weaned lambs from low meadow to the big field, vaccinated the lot with the clostridial one."

Draft the app builds (illustrative): a movement record of 90 head from Low Meadow to Big Field, and a treatment record with the product left blank because "the clostridial one" is not a product name.

What you fix: select the actual vaccine from the product list, add the batch and the withdrawal period from the bottle, and confirm the head count against the group in the app. If the app says there are 87 lambs in that group, the 90 you dictated is a counting error to resolve, not a number to accept. Those two corrections take about a minute, and they are the reason to read every draft rather than tapping save.

Costing the three routes for a year

Do this sum once, with your own quotes. The figures below are placeholders to show the shape, not vendor prices.

The time rows are guesses to be replaced with your own timings. The pattern to expect is that the notes route has the lowest cash cost and the highest time cost, and the apps reverse that. For a small enterprise with 25 hours of record work a year, the notes route often wins. At 100 hours, an app probably does. The break-even sits where your hours saved, multiplied by your hourly value, cross the annual quote.

Who should hold the records, and for how long

An app is a convenient place to keep records, but you remain responsible for them. Keep a periodic export, monthly if the app allows it, stored somewhere you control. Check how long your scheme or buyer requires you to retain records, which varies, and make sure the app's retention matches. If you stop paying, find out whether you can still read your history. Some apps keep it read-only, others lock the account. A simple monthly export to a spreadsheet, plus a printed copy of your treatment records at year end, protects you whatever happens to the vendor.

Finally, if you use an AI chat for the notes route, keep personal and financial information out of the transcripts and look at the chat service's data settings for business use. Animal records carry little risk on their own, but a transcript with a neighbour's name, a payment or an address in it is worth removing before pasting.

Which to choose, in one paragraph each

Choose AgriWebb if your main pain is capturing records in the field and you manage animals in groups; try the Farm Diary on a free trial first, and check its record types cover your jobs, remembering tasks and rainfall are not supported yet.

Choose Herdwatch if you work with individual animals and electronic tag or scale readers, you value the offer to have support enter your herd, and you want to ask questions of your own data. Test Herdi on your records, and ask support whether spoken entry is available in your version.

Choose the notes route if your official record sits somewhere you cannot move, or you want to test the idea cheaply for a season. The tutorial on AI for farm records and paperwork covers what to hand to an AI and what to keep in your own hands, and the wider app comparison adds satellite monitoring to the picture.

Whichever you pick, set a calendar date four weeks out and count the records captured by voice, the drafts you had to correct, and the minutes saved. Keep the one that wins on those three numbers, and drop the other without guilt.

Questions about voice notes and livestock records

Can I dictate a calving or treatment record into any of these apps?

AgriWebb's Farm Diary takes typed or dictated notes and turns them into draft records for livestock, pasture, cropping and opening gate events. Herdwatch describes its Herdi assistant as answering questions from your records; I could not confirm spoken record entry. Check the current app before you rely on it.

Is a plain notes app good enough?

For capturing quickly, yes. Spoken notes into a phone's notes or voice memo app cost nothing and work offline. The weak point is the second step: someone must copy each note into the official record, and that is where records get missed or mistyped.

Do I still need my official records if the app has them?

Yes, until you have confirmed that the app's records are accepted by your auditor, assurance scheme or movement system. An app, and certainly a chatbot, is a working copy. The record your regulator or buyer accepts stays the one that counts.

What should I check about regions before I pay?

Whether the app supports your animal identification and movement reporting scheme, whether it works offline in your fields, and whether support and data hosting suit your location. Herdwatch runs separate regional sites, so confirm that the one you sign up on matches your scheme.

Further reads

• AI Assistant for Farmers: ChatGPT, Claude or a Farm App? — ChatGPT, Claude or a farm app as your assistant.
• AI Automation for Agriculture: Rotas, Timesheets and Harvest Messages — Rotas and timesheets for the people who record.
• Free AI for Agriculture: What a Small Farm Gets Without Paying — What a small farm gets from free AI tools.
• Farm Accounting Software: QuickBooks, Xero or a Farm App With AI? — QuickBooks, Xero or a farm app for a small farm: enterprise-level costing, indirect tax, what AI categorisation gets wrong and what it costs.
• Farmonaut Pricing vs FieldView Plus: What Satellite Monitoring Costs — Farmonaut plans by area and FieldView Plus from $649 a year, converted to cost per hectare and acre for five farm sizes.
• AI for Agronomists: Crop Walk Write-Ups and Grower Advice Letters — Turn crop walk voice notes into a field write-up and grower letter with AI, with photo captions and a wording check. You sign every recommendation.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: AgriWebb's Farm Diary help article and pricing page, Herdwatch's website, regional pages and pricing page, and 2025 trade-press coverage of the Herdi assistant, read on 5 November 2026.