Cattle Movement Records From Voice Notes

Most cattle movement reporting gets done on a Sunday night, at the kitchen table, with a pile of ear tag numbers scribbled on the back of a feed delivery note. By then half the detail has gone. Was it the black cow with the notched ear that went to the collecting centre, or her daughter? Did the vet give the 100 ml or the 50 ml bottle?

The fix isn’t a new app or a new subscription. It’s talking into your phone in the yard, and letting an AI tool turn that into a tidy table you can paste into your records in about two minutes. This post shows the exact workflow, what it costs, and where it will trip you up.

What you’re actually required to do

In Great Britain, cattle moves on and off a holding, and births and deaths, must be reported to the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS) via the Cattle Tracing System (CTS) within 3 days in England, Wales and Scotland. Passports and keeper records have to match. Medicine records must be kept for at least 5 years, and the Red Tractor and most milk buyers will ask to see them. (Check current deadlines with BCMS or your own devolved government, because the rules differ slightly by nation and have changed before. In Scotland, ScotMoves is used for movements instead of the CTS route.)

Notice the 3 days. Doing it at the weekend means that a Monday move reported the following Sunday is already late. Same-day reporting isn’t tidiness, it’s compliance.

The workflow in five steps

1. Record a voice note in the yard. Use whatever is already on your phone. The iPhone Voice Memos app and Android’s Recorder both work. Speak in a fixed order every time. Mine is: date, what happened, tag numbers, where from and to, then anything medicinal.

2. Transcribe it. Voice Memos on recent iPhones and Google Recorder on Pixels transcribe on the device for free. If yours doesn’t, upload the audio to ChatGPT (the mobile app accepts voice input directly) or use Otter.ai, which has a free tier of 300 minutes a month.

3. Paste the transcript into an AI chat with a standing prompt (below).

4. Check the table it returns against the tags on the animals or your passports. This is the step you must not skip.

5. Key it into CTS or your herd software, or upload it if your software accepts CSV.

The speaking pattern

The AI is only as good as the note. Say tags digit by digit and say the word “tag” before each one. A note might sound like this:

“Fifteenth of October, Thursday. Moved three bullocks off to Hereford market. Tag UK 3 4 1 2 8 7 0 0 1 4 5 2, UK 3 4 1 2 8 7 0 0 1 4 5 3, and UK 3 4 1 2 8 7 0 0 1 4 6 0. Haulier was Pritchard, lorry reg Lima Kilo 21 Bravo Charlie Delta. Left the yard about quarter past seven. Also, cow tag 0877, calved a bull calf in the shed overnight, tagged him 0912. Treated cow 0877 with Metacam, 10 ml, for lameness, right hind.”

Saying the phonetic alphabet for registrations helps. Saying “tag” as a marker helps more.

The standing prompt

Save this in your phone’s notes app and paste it before each transcript:

You are helping a UK cattle keeper prepare records. From the transcript below, produce two tables.

Table 1: Movements and births/deaths. Columns: Date, Event (on/off/birth/death), Ear tag (full 14 characters, UK + 12 digits), Sex, Origin, Destination, Haulier, Vehicle reg, Time.
Table 2: Medicines. Columns: Date, Ear tag, Product, Dose, Route, Reason, Batch number, Withdrawal period (meat/milk), Treated by.

Rules: Never guess. If a value is missing or unclear, write CHECK in that cell. Do not invent batch numbers or withdrawal periods. After the tables, list anything you were unsure about.

The “never guess” rule matters more than any other line. Without it, models will cheerfully fill gaps with plausible nonsense.

What comes back

From the note above, you’d expect something like this:

Table 1
| Date       | Event | Ear tag          | Sex | Origin | Destination   | Haulier  | Vehicle reg | Time  |
|------------|-------|------------------|-----|--------|---------------|----------|-------------|-------|
| 15/10/2026 | Off   | UK 341287001452  | CHECK | Home | Hereford market | Pritchard | LK21 BCD  | 07:15 |
| 15/10/2026 | Off   | UK 341287001453  | CHECK | Home | Hereford market | Pritchard | LK21 BCD  | 07:15 |
| 15/10/2026 | Off   | UK 341287001460  | CHECK | Home | Hereford market | Pritchard | LK21 BCD  | 07:15 |
| 15/10/2026 | Birth | UK 3412870000912 | Male  | Home | n/a           | n/a      | n/a         | CHECK |

Table 2
| Date       | Ear tag | Product | Dose  | Route | Reason   | Batch | Withdrawal       | Treated by |
| 15/10/2026 | 0877    | Metacam | 10 ml | CHECK | Lameness (RH) | CHECK | CHECK       | CHECK      |

Unsure: Cow 0877 and calf 0912 are partial tags; full 14-character numbers needed.

That is a realistic result, and it shows why you check. The model flagged the missing batch number and withdrawal, which is exactly right: you didn’t say them, so it shouldn’t know them. It also noticed the partial tags. Look at the calf’s tag in the example though: it has one digit too many. That is the kind of slip you catch in step 4, and a reason never to submit without reading.

What this costs

For most holdings, the free tier is enough. A suckler herd of 60 cows might generate perhaps 15 to 25 events a month outside calving, so you will use a few dozen messages. Paying £20 a month only makes sense if you’re running a large calving block or dairy herd with daily treatments.

Compare that with time. If the Sunday sit-down takes 90 minutes a week, that’s roughly 78 hours a year. Five minutes on each of 150 working days is about 12.5 hours. Even valuing your time at a modest £15 an hour, you are saving around £980 a year, before counting late-reporting penalties or cross-compliance headaches.

Where it goes wrong

Tag digits. Speech-to-text mishears “fifteen” and “fifty”. Say digits individually. Always.

Medicine details. The AI cannot know a withdrawal period. Take it from the product datasheet or label, the vet’s prescription and the actual batch on the bottle. Photograph the bottle label at the time of treatment and add that to the same note folder.

Confidentiality. Don’t paste your holding number, CPH, or the vet’s personal details into a free consumer chat if you’re not comfortable with it. The tags alone are low risk. If you want more control, switch off chat history in ChatGPT’s data settings, or use a business plan.

Accuracy is yours. The record is your legal record. The AI is a typist, not a stockman.

Setting it up this week

Make a note called “Yard prompt” with the text above. Practise on one day’s activity, then compare the table to what you’d have written by hand. After a week you’ll know which fields the model gets wrong for your setup, whether that’s the haulier name, your farm’s local place names, or breed codes, and you can add a line to the prompt: “Haulier names to expect: Pritchard, Evans Livestock, Jones Bros.”

If you want the wider picture on using ChatGPT for the rest of your paperwork, such as inspection prep, supplier emails and grant applications, the guide to ChatGPT and AI for Farm Admin covers it.

Start tomorrow with the first move of the day. Talk into the phone before you get back in the cab.