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Efficient farm management, good scientific research, and effective selection are possible only if the data are easily accessible, accurate, and gathered routinely. The upkeep of paper records is not only cumbersome and difficult to maintain but is also hard to replicate and requires a lot of physical space. The lack of proper digitized farm records has hindered farm development as well as the creation of future-oriented breeding policies. Also, the absence of a centralized cloud-based database and the unavailability of duplicate records leads to the possibility of data loss due to factors like pests, theft, loss, fire, floods, etc. which have happened in some instances in the past. Progress in the farm operation cannot be determined from year to year without keeping an inventory and deriving rapid inferences from paper records is impractical but a digital inventory is flexible, efficient, rapid, and accurate32. A web-based DSS catering to most aspects of sheep farm data management would help in the creation of a system for the safe storage, analysis, retrieval, and effective use of data.
It is almost impossible to draw real-time, on-spot inferences from manual data. This especially hinders breeding decisions that require procedures that are computationally expensive and require vast amounts of data. Having to manually enter massive amounts of data into the system before analysis consumes a considerable amount of a researcher’s time and energy33. As a result, research is not only delayed but the quality of the actual research is compromised. Therefore, selection on farms in India is still intuition based and the genetic progress is very low. The benefits in terms of saving time by efficient data handling have also been stressed by Lawson et al.34.
E-linking of the University farm with other sheep farms would be necessary for ONBS which would generally increase the genetic merit of animals across farms35. Web-based farm management information systems facilitate…
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