Chicken breeding records with no internet
Short answer: keep the records on a laptop, not on a website. Then they work at the coop with no signal, and catch up when you are back in the house.
On BackYard Chickens, in a thread called breeding records templates, a pedigree breeder asked what everyone else records. Their list: setting eggs and incubation, hatch day, chick growth, pedigrees, a record for each breeder bird, breeding pen set-up and moves, egg production, and income and expenses. They wanted a growth form they could “come back to at set intervals” to add new weights, and the breed standard to hand outside. What they had found to buy was either too general or made for egg farms. (Posted 30 September 2024, read 3 November 2026.)
That is not one form. It is a few lists that point at each other: birds, pens, settings, hatches and weigh-ins.
How the lists fit together
| List | What one row is | Points at |
|---|---|---|
| Birds | One bird: band, breed, variety, sex, hatch date | Its sire and dam, which are birds too |
| Pens | One breeding pen and when it was set up | — |
| Settings | Eggs set on a date, how many, from which pen | A pen |
| Hatches | Hatch day: how many pipped, hatched, culled | A setting |
| Weigh-ins | One weight on one date | A bird |
| Breed standards | What the standard says for one breed | — |
The “come back at set intervals” form is the Weigh-ins list. Each weigh-in is a new row linked to the bird, so opening a bird shows every weight it has had, in order. A bird page also lists the chicks that name it as sire or dam.
Records that live on the laptop
Bionic Forms builds a small app from a spreadsheet or a sentence, such as “chicken breeding records with pens, egg settings, hatches, weigh-ins and pedigrees”. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy on the computer. With no connection at all you can:
- Add a weigh-in or a hatch with the date, the numbers and a note.
- Attach a photo of a bird to its own record.
- Search and sort: every bird of one variety, every setting from one pen, hatches by date.
- See settings on a calendar by the date they were set.
When the laptop finds a connection again, the changes go up by themselves, and a second computer sees the same records.
Getting a spreadsheet in
Drop the .xlsx on our home page. A workbook with several sheets asks which one to start with; start with the birds. Bring each other sheet in afterwards with Import inside the app. When a later sheet has a Bird Name column, each row is linked to the bird it names. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app.
Where this is honest
- Sire and dam come in as plain text. We do not guess which bird a “Sire” column means. You turn it into a link to Birds yourself, in the field editor, once. After that you pick the parent from a list.
- Names have to match to link. Capitals do not matter, but a bird spelled two ways is left unlinked, and if two birds share a name nothing on that sheet is linked.
- No formulas. A hatch rate or a lock-down date worked out from the set date comes in as a plain value. Type it in.
- No phone app yet. Offline is the desktop app only; in a browser, ours needs a connection too. If the records must be on a phone in your pocket, an offline phone app will suit you better today.
- Set it up while you have a connection. The AI that builds the app runs on our server. Using it afterwards does not need one.
- We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.
Build it now. The box already says what this page is about. Change it if you like.
About 25 seconds. No signup to see the result.
Already keep a spreadsheet? Drop it on the home page instead.
Or open the live demo first. No email.
Rather not do it yourself? Tell us what you track and we will build a working version and show you. No fee.
More: what happens to the other tabs in a spreadsheet, files on records and rabbit breeding records.