Sheep ID to bring rewards

As lamb supply chain co-ordinator at Australia’s largest sheep and lamb processor, he said the ability to individually manage animals was useful for consistency of supply which drove repeat sales, and for delivering market signals and information along the value chain.

But he said the tags were still a significant cost, ranging from 83 cents a subsidised tag in Victoria to about $1.10/tag in other States.

The company has four plants – at Tamworth and Wallangarra, NSW, and in Murray Bridge and Lobethal, South Australia – and is keen to support individual identification and show how producers can justify the EID cost.

However, he stressed Thomas did not want mandatory EID at this stage.

Speaking at LambEx 2014 on strategies for the Australian sheep producer to capitalise on the opportunities he said apart from traceability for food safety and exotic disease control, EID gave industry the ability to significantly improve livestock management with options such as walk-over weighing, managing ewes, and monitoring lambs.

Dr Rutley used an example of Rangers Valley feedlot at Glen Innes where he had analysed data in previous years.

It had achieved gains using individual identification of $20 a fed steer.

The feedlot had been predicting vendor performance since 1994 and had eliminated the bottom 20 per cent of its suppliers.

This was worth $750,000/year to Rangers Valley, which targeted the highly marbled Japanese market, feeding 35,000 Angus and Murray Grey-crosses.

Some lamb feedlots were sending lambs to market in vendor lots to enable them to get vendor performance figures but without EID this practice was time consuming and expensive.

Dr Rutley said there was a real risk EID could be forced on Australian producers by the European Union (EU) and later by other markets in the near future.

Last October TFI livestock manager Paul Leonard attended the International Sheep Meat Forum in Brussels and returned with a clear message that although the EU currently accepted Australia’s mob-based traceability, it may soon not accept it.

EU member States were applying as much political pressure as possible to demand all importers provide individual animal traceability, and any future food scares could hasten this.

“They have to individual ID for food security and safety all of their animals – why shouldn’t Australia? The European housewife can’t tell the difference,” Dr Rutley said.

He hoped producers would adopt EID.

“It will be a big imposition and shock to the system if it was mandated, however, the indications are it is fast approaching, maybe five or three years.

“However, knowing our customers require consistency and our value chain requires information and knowledge, we see a great opportunity for voluntary adoption now.”

He said lamb was not facing a cost-price-squeeze, with returns consistently growing faster than costs.

But it could still do better through managing animals individually via the use of EID.