Data Collection for Small-Scale Poultry Farms

Google Forms: A free, easy-to-use and powerful tool for capturing and analyzing data

At the UC Davis Pastured Poultry Farm, collecting and analyzing data helps us make informed management decisions related to farm economics and animal care and management. Below are some examples from our farm:

Farm economics: By capturing production data about our egg-laying hens such as how many eggs are collected each day and how much is spent on feed, we have been able to determine egg prices more efficiently.
Animal care and management: Based on our egg data, we noticed that our hens were not laying as many eggs as we expected. This helped us determine that the hens were not getting enough light. Once the lighting program was fixed, our hens started to lay more eggs.

While paper forms were easy to make and use, we found that transferring the data into a spreadsheet was time-consuming and tedious. Fortunately, inexpensive and easy to use tools such as Google Forms (free) can help us record, share and analyze data more easily.

Convenient features:

Form responses are automatically entered into an Excel spreadsheet. This eliminates the need to manually transfer data from a paper form to an Excel spreadsheet and become ready for data analysis immediately.
Data is readily available through Google Drive for “collaborators” on their mobile devices and computers.

Things to consider:

Need a Gmail account to utilize Google Drive and Google Forms.
A smartphone, tablet or laptop with internet access is required in order to access the form and submit responses.

At the UC Davis Pastured Poultry Farm, our team has created a Google Form that captures data for three aspects of our farm: