Terms of Use

These terms apply to every organisation that uses FlockTrial and to everyone who signs in to it. By setting your password, or by carrying on using FlockTrial after we have told you about a new version, you agree to them. If you accept on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you may bind it.

Plain language on purpose. If something here is unclear, ask us before you rely on it.

1. Who we are

FlockTrial is a FarmBind product, operated by FarmBind (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2026/788176/07), a South African company ("we", "us"). Contact: support@farmbind.com.

2. What FlockTrial is

FlockTrial is software for setting up, capturing and exporting animal feeding and treatment trials. You describe the trial (treatments, feeds, pens, birds, schedule), FlockTrial generates the pen layout, your team captures the data, and you export it for your own analysis.

FlockTrial is a tool. It is not a statistical, veterinary, nutritional, legal or ethics service, and nothing it shows you is professional advice. Summary figures on screen (means, counts, standard deviations) are a working aid, not results for publication. Your statistical analysis is yours.

3. Organisations and users

There is no self-signup. We create your organisation and its first client administrator. Your client administrators then add researchers and capturers, within the number of seats agreed for each trial or licence, and hand each new user a one-time setup link.

Your organisation is responsible for:

• who it gives access to, what role and trials they get, and deactivating people who should no longer have access;
• what its users do in FlockTrial;
• each user keeping their password (and authenticator app, if they use one) to themselves. Every entry is recorded against the person who signed in, so a shared login makes the audit trail wrong.

4. How a trial is paid for and opened

• Trials are licensed one at a time, or under an annual licence that covers a number of trials. The price, the number of trials, the licence period and the number of seats are in our quote or invoice.
• You pay by EFT against our invoice. We do not take card payments in the platform.
• One trial at a time: we open a trial only once it is paid. We then enable it, and your client administrator sets it up and starts it.
• Annual licence: the licence runs for 12 months from the date we receive payment. During those 12 months your client administrator opens trials directly in the platform, up to the number the licence covers. Extra trials can be added to a licence; we invoice them and add them once they are paid. A licence does not renew automatically: a following year is a new licence by agreement.
• Setup is locked when a trial starts, so check it before you press Start trial.
• Each trial's own capture period runs from its start date for the agreed number of months, also when it was opened under an annual licence. We may extend it by agreement, and an extension may be charged.
• When the licence ends, the trial closes: you can still see and export everything, but nothing more can be captured. When a client administrator locks the trial, it becomes read-only for good.

Refunds are covered in our Refund Policy.

5. What you may not do

• Use FlockTrial to break the law, or to record data you know to be false.
• Try to reach another organisation's data, or get around any access limit.
• Share logins, or let more people use a trial than its seats allow.
• Resell, sublicense or rebrand FlockTrial, unless we have agreed it with you in writing.
• Attack, overload or interfere with the platform, or copy, scrape or reverse engineer its software.

6. Your data is yours

The trial data your organisation captures and uploads belongs to your organisation. We hold and process it for you, as your operator under POPIA, on the terms in the Data Processing Agreement.

We do not sell it, we do not show it to another organisation, and we do not use it for our own purposes. Trial data can be commercially sensitive to a sponsor; we treat all of it as confidential.

Your organisation can export its trial data at any time while it has access, in the formats the platform offers (XLSX and CSV), and can ask us for a copy after its access ends.

7. Integrity of the record

FlockTrial is built so that a trial's data can be trusted:

• every change is recorded with who made it, when, the old and the new value, and the reason;
• a capture is never silently overwritten. A correction voids the old entry, with a reason, and records a new one; both stay in the history;
• figures that can be calculated are calculated, never typed;
• uploaded results files can be withdrawn, with a reason, but are not deleted;
• a locked trial cannot be changed by anyone.

8. Checking your data

FlockTrial checks entries at capture time for impossible or implausible values. Those checks catch many mistakes; they cannot catch all of them, and they are not a comparison against any breed standard. We do not verify what your team captures.

Check your data before you rely on it, for a report, a publication, a sponsor or an ethics committee. The responsibility for the data being right stays with your organisation.

9. When we change a calculation

If we change something that makes FlockTrial calculate or export a different figure from the same captured data, we will tell you. That includes correcting our own mistake. We will not delay a correction to give notice first.

10. If something is broken

Tell us at support@farmbind.com. Our response targets are in the Service Levels document. They are targets, not guarantees.

11. What we are not responsible for

We are not responsible for loss caused by data that was captured wrongly, incompletely or late, by how your organisation or anyone else analyses or uses the data, or by a decision made on it.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profit, lost research, a failed or repeated trial, lost animals, or a claim by a sponsor or other third party.

Our total liability for all claims combined is limited to the fees your organisation paid us for the trial the claim relates to, in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Nothing here limits liability for gross negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Suspending or ending access

Your organisation may stop using FlockTrial at any time. Trials already paid for stay available until their licence ends. Trials opened under an annual licence stay available until their own capture period ends, also after the licence year has ended.

We may suspend or end access if you breach these terms, if an invoice stays unpaid, or if the law requires it. Except where the breach is serious, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

When access ends, your organisation keeps the right to a copy of its trial data. Ask us and we will provide it.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is material we will tell your organisation's administrators before it takes effect. The version and its effective date are shown at the top of this page.

14. Law and signatures

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.

Setting your password on the setup page, which tells you that doing so accepts these terms, is your agreement to them by electronic means under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002.

If our signed agreement or quote with your organisation says something different from these terms, the signed agreement wins.