Dairy farm management software
Dairy farm management software that tells you what a litre costs
Lactra tracks every animal, every milking and every rupee — then finishes the arithmetic your spreadsheet never quite gets to. Cattle and buffalo. Works offline on any Android phone.
Free for 20 animalsNo cardEnglish & اردوImport from Excel
The problem
You already know your herd. You don't know your numbers.
Most farms this size run on three or four registers and one person's memory.
The breeding register is in the office. The milk register is at the shed. The feed bills are in a drawer. Nobody has closed the loop between them since the accountant last visited.
You can feel the problems — a cow that has dropped off, a shed eating more than it should, milk that does not add up at the end of the week — but you cannot prove them or price them. So they run for months.
Dairy farm management software is only worth installing if it closes that loop. That is the whole design brief for Lactra.
Features
What you get
Animal registry
Every animal with tag, RFID, breed, species, pedigree three generations deep, purchase price, shed history and photo. Cattle and buffalo handled separately, because they are different animals.
Status moves automatically as events happen — a calving opens a lactation, a dry-off closes one. Import your existing herd from Excel with a template and a validation preview, so you see every error before anything is committed.
Milk recording
Per animal, per shift, in litres or kilograms. Three ways to enter it: a table view listing every milking animal for fast sequential entry, an Excel import, or one animal at a time.
Milk is split by where it actually goes — saleable, calves, household, staff, discarded — so the balance genuinely balances.
The milk drop alert flags any animal falling more than 20% below her own trailing average. It is usually the first sign of mastitis, and it is the single most useful thing the software does.
Breeding & reproduction
Heats, services (AI or natural), pregnancy diagnoses, calvings with ease scoring, abortions and dry-offs. Semen inventory tied to services, so every straw is accounted for by batch, bull and tank position.
Days open, calving interval, services per conception and 21-day pregnancy rate calculated the way your vet expects — and reported as distributions, not just averages, because a herd with a good average and a bad spread is a herd in trouble.
Animal health
Treatments, vaccinations and deworming — individually, by group, or by shed, which is how it actually happens on a Pakistani farm. Medicine comes out of inventory automatically with batch and expiry.
Withdrawal periods are calculated on every treatment and enforced at milking: a treated animal is flagged and her milk excluded from saleable volume by default. That one rule is the difference between a clean tanker and a rejected load.
Feed & inventory
Feed, medicine and semen as their own ledgers, with every consumption traced back to the event that caused it. Feed cost per animal per day and per litre produced. Low-stock and expiry alerts before you run out, not after.
Dairy accounting
A real chart of accounts, a real trial balance, real party ledgers. Costs post automatically from the events that generate them. Which is exactly why the cost-per-litre number is trustworthy, rather than something somebody typed into a cell.
Mobile app
Android, offline-first, built for a 2GB phone on a bad connection. Enter a full day of records with no signal at all; it syncs when the signal returns. Role-based home screens, so a milker, a vet and an owner each open to a different first screen.
Species
Buffalo isn't a cattle variant
Buffalo is the majority of Pakistan's milk and a large share of India's — and almost every dairy farm management system on the market treats it as a cattle record with a different label.
The lactation curve is a different shape. Standard fat is 6.0%, not 4.0%. Gestation runs longer. Heat expression is weaker and harder to detect, which changes what the reproduction alerts should even be looking for.
Lactra models buffalo separately — its own curves, its own benchmarks, its own defaults — and supports Nili Ravi, Kundi, Murrah and crosses by name.
Comparison
How Lactra compares
| Capability | Lactra | DairyCare | Channab | HerdManager |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Herd, breeding and health records | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Milk recording per animal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Buffalo as a distinct species | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Real accounting & cost per litre | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Partial |
| Offline Android app | ✓ | Not stated | ✓ | ✓ |
| Urdu interface | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Docs only |
| Milk analyzer integration | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Milk collection & farmer payments | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Published pricing | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
Compiled from public vendor materials, September 2026. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Questions
Common questions
How many animals can it handle?
Comfortably from 20 to several thousand. It is tuned for 30–500, which is where most commercial and peri-urban dairy farms sit.
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. The Android app is the primary interface for shed staff and it works fully offline — a whole day of records with no signal, synced when the connection returns.
Does it work for buffalo?
Yes, as a distinct species with its own lactation curves, standard fat, breeding intervals and benchmarks — not a cattle form with the label changed.
Can I move my existing records over?
Yes, from Excel or CSV, with a downloadable template, a validation preview and per-row error reporting before anything is committed.
Is there free dairy farm management software?
Ours is free up to 20 animals, permanently. Genuinely free options beyond that are thin — most “free download” results are unmaintained desktop tools with no support, no backup and no mobile app, and there is no credible open-source dairy herd system.
What does it cost?
Free for 20 animals. $12 a month up to 100 animals, $29 a month up to 500. All features are on every paid plan — you pay for size, not for capability.
Try it on your own herd
Import your animals, record a week of milkings, and look at your cost per litre. If it isn't useful, you have lost a week and no money.