Genetics Tools
Beyond the family tree, Herd Manager calculates what a pedigree actually means — how related two animals are, what a pairing would concentrate, and whether your herd's gene pool is quietly narrowing.
Where: Breeding tab → 🧬 Genetics, then the subtabs across the top.
A coefficient calculated from a two-generation pedigree is not wrong so much as incomplete — and incompleteness always biases the same direction. Missing ancestors can't reveal shared ones, so thin pedigrees produce numbers that read lower than the truth. Treat a low COI from a shallow pedigree as unknown, not safe.
🔗 Relatedness
Pick any two animals and see how closely they're related, based on shared ancestors in your recorded pedigrees.
Useful when you're:
- Considering a buck for a doe and want a number before committing
- Evaluating a purchase against the herd you already have
- Checking whether two animals you assumed were unrelated actually aren't
You need at least two animals with pedigree data for this to say anything.
🧬 Linebreeding Planner
Linebreeding is deliberate concentration of a particular ancestor's genes. Done knowingly it's a tool; done accidentally it's just inbreeding.
The planner shows what a proposed pairing would concentrate — which ancestor, and how heavily — so the decision is explicit. Pair it with the Linebreeding & COI guide if you want the background on what levels are considered safe.
🌱 Genetic Diversity
A herd-level view rather than a pairing-level one:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Pedigree Coverage | How complete your recorded pedigrees actually are — the confidence level for everything else on this page |
| Founders Traced | How many foundation animals your herd descends from |
| Effective Founders | How many founders are meaningfully represented. Much lower than "founders traced" means a few animals dominate |
| Founder Representation | Which foundation animals contribute most |
The gap between founders traced and effective founders is the number worth watching. Twenty founders where three account for most of the ancestry is a narrower herd than the first figure suggests.
If pedigree coverage is low, the diversity figures describe the pedigrees you've recorded rather than the herd you own. Improving coverage — even a generation or two on key animals — changes what these numbers are worth.
🌲 Family Tree
Explore pedigrees generation by generation, including external ancestors you've recorded but don't own. See How to Read a Goat Pedigree if the abbreviations and titles are unfamiliar.
📈 Sire/Dam Performance
Report cards per parent, built from offspring actually in your herd: offspring count, daughters' milk production, average birth weight, average adjusted 90-day weight, appraisal scores, and survival rate.
Weight columns are age-anchored — birth weight, and weaning weight normalized to exactly 90 days — so kids weighed on different dates compare fairly. A kid without a weight in the relevant window is left out of that column rather than averaged in.
These are not ADGA or CDCB evaluations. Those are calculated across an entire breed population; this describes how a parent's offspring performed on your farm. Small offspring counts are unreliable, so metrics are hidden below two offspring with data, and the n beside each figure is the sample size.
🐐 Doe Fertility
Kidding intervals, days open, and repeat-breeder flagging — the reproductive-efficiency side of the same picture.