This girl is one of our favorite cows. U16 is out of our Old Number One cow, who was with us for many years. U16 is raising her fifth calf this year. She also shows one of the problems we have with ear tags. They are the form of animal ID that we rely on most, but they have a tendency to get caught in trees, resulting in tears like you see in her right ear. She has a unique marking on her face, so she’s easy to ID if she loses her tag, but some of our cows, mainly our registered cows, have tattoos in their ears to help identify them, and some have RFID tags, and some have all three. Plus fly tags! Keeping tabs on individual cows is important. We use a software program called CattleMax to help us keep up with the breeding and medical records on each animal.