Times have changed since MacFarlane Pheasants started in the 1920s with some land and a handful of pheasant eggs. As America’s largest pheasant farm, we’ve stepped up our game when it comes to electronics, and more than ever the sales side of the job is handled from behind a computer. It’s because of our reliance on this technology that we’ve come to protect it like a child.Each and every day, we back up our computer system on a hard drive that is then taken off site. We do this to protect against both acts of God—fires, earthquakes, etc.—and acts of man, such as someone opening the wrong cat picture sent as an attachment and accidentally downloading a virus. Should something like this happen, we would be able to restore all but that day’s worth of data. It would be a nuisance, but not an irreversible loss. It’s a precaution we’ve taken for more than five years.
Although MacFarlane Pheasants doesn’t have an IT department, we do have an IT employee, whose responsibilities include keeping us up-to-date on software and troubleshooting problems as they arise. We also contract with our hometown IT company, StarTech Computing, for bigger issues. If something major happens, it’s nice to know we can turn to neighbors for a fix.
Despite our heavy use of computers for the business, we don’t experience a whole lot of issues, in part because of the simple software we use. Besides the Microsoft Office suite, the only other major program we use is QuickBooks for our accounting. This has helped keep our tech upkeep to a minimum, and as it stands now, we only experience issues a few times a year, and they’re generally minor.
From sales to delivery schedules, from eggs to day-old chicks and adult birds, MacFarlane Pheasants, has moved beyond the days of an old paper-and-pencil ledger. Computers have allowed us to expand our business and more accurately mine data, like hatch viability and egg production. It’s because of this importance that we protect our electronics with a daily backup. It just helps us sleep better at night.
