Poultry Farm Tracker
A mobile-first farm record system for tracking broiler and layer flocks, finances and performance.
Poultry Farm Tracker is a mobile-first record-keeping application for small-to-medium poultry farms. I built it around a family operation in Zimbabwe: the people doing the daily work need fast forms on their phones, while an owner in another location needs a trustworthy view of production, costs and problems.
From notebooks to useful decisions
Farm records are valuable only when they are both easy to capture and easy to interpret. A detailed form that takes several minutes will not survive a busy morning or an unreliable 3G connection. A simple total, on the other hand, does not explain why mortality increased or whether a flock is profitable.
The daily-entry flow uses progressive disclosure to keep routine recording to about thirty seconds. Feed, water, mortality and egg numbers can be entered quickly, with more detail available when something unusual needs recording.
Broilers and layers are different businesses
The application models broiler batches and layer houses separately rather than forcing both into one generic flock.
Broiler batches have a defined lifecycle from day-old chick placement to sell-off. The tracker calculates feed conversion ratio, cost per bird, projected revenue and profit, with alerts around the typical 56-day cycle.
Layer houses are continuous operations. Birds can be added over time, and the app distinguishes pre-lay from producing birds when calculating hen-day production. It also accounts for moulting periods and tracks egg sales separately from bird sales.
Across both models, the system records:
- feed purchases, inventory and daily consumption;
- mortality and reasons for losses;
- vaccinations and reminders;
- bird, egg and other sales;
- operating expenses;
- eggs or birds taken for home use at their market value; and
- revenue, profit, return on investment and allocation of profits.
Farm-wide dashboards combine those records into trends and alerts, while batch, house and monthly views make it possible to investigate the underlying figures. Multiple overlapping broiler batches and multiple layer houses can be tracked at the same time.
Built for a team
An owner can create a farm and invite other people with a code. Role-based access separates owners, operators and viewers, allowing staff to enter daily records without giving every account control over the whole farm.
The responsive interface is a React and TypeScript application, with charts for production and financial trends. Amazon Cognito handles sign-in. API Gateway and TypeScript Lambda functions provide the backend, with shared Zod schemas validating data at the boundary.
Records are stored in a DynamoDB single-table design. Broiler activity is grouped beneath a batch and layer activity beneath a house, while secondary indexes support farm-wide and date-range queries. AWS CDK defines the infrastructure, including private S3 and CloudFront hosting for the front end.
The test suite combines unit tests, property-based tests and browser-level integration tests. Development and production environments deploy separately through path-filtered GitHub Actions workflows.
The application is still in development, but the source and architecture are available under the Apache 2.0 licence.