What Howdy Ag Actually Does

A walk through the whole thing, no sales pitch

The Short Version

I've talked about why I built Howdy Ag. What I haven't done is actually walk through what it does. Not in a features-list, check-all-the-boxes way. More in a "here's what I actually use every day and why it matters" way.

I'll go deeper on each of these down the road. This is just the barn tour.

Your Animals, All in One Place

This is where most people start, and honestly where I spend most of my time. You add your animals, whether that's three registered Dexter cows or three hundred Cornish Cross, and everything about them lives in one spot. Health records, weight history, lineage, photos, notes, status. If it's a registered animal, the registration number links right to the pedigree database.

The thing that matters most to me is that it handles multiple species without making you jump between apps or tabs. Cattle, chickens, sheep, goats, pigs. They all share one dashboard, one interface, one login. Your layer flock and your cow herd show up side by side because that's how they exist on your actual farm. Nobody runs their cattle operation in one building and their chicken operation in another building on the other side of town. They're all right there. Your software should work the same way.

Need to pull up every bred cow due in March? That's one click. Need to see which meat bird batches are approaching target weight? Same place.

Genetics That Actually Matter

Genetic testing is getting more accessible and more affordable every year, and the information it gives you is becoming a bigger part of how people make management and breeding decisions. Knowing your animals' genetic status isn't just paperwork for the breed association anymore. It's data that changes what you do with those animals.

Howdy Ag tracks breed-specific genetic markers with real logic behind them. For Dexters, that means chondrodysplasia, PHA, polled status, color genetics, and A2 beta-casein. These aren't just text fields where you type "carrier" and hope you remember to check before breeding season. The system actually uses the data. When you're planning a pairing, it runs the genetics and shows you what to expect. Punnett square probabilities, carrier risk percentages, and warnings when a combination carries real danger. If you're thinking about pairing two chondro carriers, the app is going to make sure you know exactly what that means before you do it.

Other breeds get their own trait profiles too. I'm not going to pretend the genetics module is equally deep for every breed yet. Dexters are where I live, so that's where it's strongest. But the framework is there and I'm building it out with input from breeders in other breed communities.

Money In, Money Out, Schedule F Ready

Howdy Ag tracks income and expenses with Schedule F categories baked in from the start. When you log a feed purchase, it already knows that's a Schedule F Part II expense. When you sell a dozen eggs at the farm stand, that's Part I income. You're not categorizing anything at tax time because you already did it when it happened, and it only took a couple of seconds.

It handles equipment depreciation, which is one of those things that sounds boring until you realize you've been doing it wrong and your CPA has to fix three years of returns. It connects to your bank through Plaid so transactions flow in without you hand-typing every receipt. And it tracks costs per animal, per group, per species, so when someone asks you "what does it actually cost you to raise a calf to sale weight?" you can give them a real answer instead of a guess.

I'll do a whole post on the financial side because honestly it deserves one.

Equipment

Your tractor, your truck, your trailer, your mower. They all cost money to buy, money to maintain, and money to run. And if you're filing a Schedule F, they all have depreciation implications that your CPA is going to ask about. Most people track none of this until tax season, and then it's a scramble to remember when they bought the hay rake and what they paid for it.

Howdy Ag has an equipment registry where each piece of equipment gets its own record. Purchase price, purchase date, category, depreciation method. The tax side handles itself from there. But the part I actually use the most day to day is the maintenance log. Oil changes, belt replacements, tire rotations, hydraulic fluid, whatever you do to keep things running. It's all logged with dates and costs so you can see the full service history of any piece of equipment and know what it's actually costing you to keep on the farm.

For trucks and other vehicles, there's mileage tracking. Log your trips to the feed store, the sale barn, the vet, wherever. It adds up faster than you think, and come tax time that mileage is deductible. Having it already recorded instead of trying to reconstruct a year's worth of farm-related driving is one of those things that pays for itself.

Grazing and Pasture Management

I do rotational grazing on our place, and keeping track of which paddock was grazed when, how long it's been resting, and where the animals are right now was yet another notebook that kept falling behind. By mid-summer I'd be looking at the pastures trying to remember if I moved the cows off the back field two weeks ago or three.

Howdy Ag has pasture mapping where you draw your paddock boundaries on a satellite view and assign animal groups to them. It tracks rotation history, calculates rest periods, and ties into weather data so you can see what conditions looked like alongside your grazing decisions. It's not going to replace walking your pastures and looking at the grass. Nothing replaces that. But it gives you the history you need to make better decisions next time and the time after that.

Egg Production and Poultry

I almost didn't mention this separately because it's part of the animal management system, but honestly the egg tracking is one of the features people use the most. You log your daily count, and over time you can see production trends by flock, spot drops before they become problems, and tie it all back to costs so you know whether your egg sales are actually making money or just making you feel productive.

If you've ever had a farm sitter watch your birds for a weekend and wanted to tell them "we've been averaging about 22 a day, so if you're getting 12, something's wrong," that's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to check. Your sitter doesn't need to dig through your records or text you for the numbers. They can just look.

The Marketplace

Howdy Ag has a marketplace built in. For livestock, you can generate a sale listing directly from your existing animal records. Breed, genetics, registration, health history, all of it pulls in automatically. No retyping, no forgetting to mention she's A2/A2 or that her dam threw great calves. For your farm products like eggs, meat, and produce, there's a consumer-facing storefront where local buyers can find you and see what you've got available.

There's also a farm discovery map so people in your area can find local farms. If you're selling at a farm stand or doing direct-to-consumer, being discoverable matters. And if all you want is that map visibility without the full management side, you can list your farm on the marketplace for free at howdyag.farm/list-your-farm.

Reports

I'm going to be brief here because each of these deserves its own post. Howdy Ag has reporting that covers profit and loss, cost analysis, production trends, and Schedule F exports. The goal is that when tax season comes around, you're handing your CPA a clean, organized export instead of a shoebox.

What It Costs

There's a free tier, and it's generous. Paid tiers start at $15 a month and go up to $45 for the full package with bank integrations and higher limits. The pricing page at howdyag.farm has the full breakdown, but the short version is that it's built for small farm budgets, not enterprise ones.

Go Look

Head to howdyag.farm and poke around. Sign up if you want, or just list your farm on the marketplace if that's all you need right now. I'll be writing more detailed posts about each of these pieces over the coming weeks, so if anything here caught your eye, stick around.

And if you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, I want to hear it. That's how this thing keeps getting better.