Grassroots has provided software to breed societies for over 20 years. 2021 was a particularly busy year, with the roll out of the first iteration of the new Grassroots Online Registry, to replace the old PedeWeb. This was the culmination of three years of work and the first visible part of the journey. There are three people working full time on the software developments and there are new iterations of the system on the way.
Generally the new system has been very well received. There have been almost 200,000 separate visits to the new system, over 125,000 ‘Manage My Animal’ transactions and 42,000 births recorded in the past six months. Grassroots have tried to react quickly to any problems as they were identified, and incorporate ideas into the next iteration which is already well on the way.
Some members have asked ‘what is it all about’ and so by way of explanation:
The old system had to change because it was almost 20 years old, and could not incorporate many modern features. It was never designed for use on a phone.
Grassroots have created a new database, which is going to eventually provide us all with many new tools and features, and in 2021 they spent a great deal of time tidying the data for each breed in turn and migrating them into the new database. Almost all the breeds have now been migrated over, a total of nearly 4 million animal records !
In order for farmers to access this new database Grassroots Online was written as an initial replacement for PedeWeb. It needed to work with the existing office system, provide all the tools farmers were used to, incorporate the limitations of the old system and the opportunities for the new.
The next iteration of the Farmers Online system to be rolled out in 2022 will have a number of new features. It will be more interactive, and will work better on a phone, although there will always be limitations of accessing the Online Registry website on a phone, because there is so much data to display and manipulate.
This was the reason Grassroots invested in the creation of a specialist mobile phone App for both Apple and Android devices. The mobile App enables members to hold all the details of their own animals in all their Grassroots breeds on one device, with access even when they have no mobile or internet signal. It links to the main database to ‘Manage my Animals’, and has additional features including notes and images. The App can be downloaded from the Apple AppStore or Google PlayStore, search for Grassroots Systems.
Many breeds are also making full use of the new Online ‘Sales Module’ which has already been used to create 228 catalogue for 31 different auctioneers.
