AT THE South Eastern Livestock Exchange (SELX) at Yass, technological adaptation is a core feature with an eye to the future of how saleyards can grow their market footprint.
Tom Newsome is the owner of Outcross, Armidale, a service provider to the saleyards sector. His business installed and operates the software at SELX.
Mr Newsome said Outcross managed several saleyards from Queensland to the Victorian border and across the board he was seeing an expansion of digital management of stock and sale information.
“So rather than booking cattle and working them manually, there’s a movement towards doing that electronically. We develop all our software systems to try and streamline that data entry so at the point where cattle are being drafted, booked or sold, we’re entering that information in real time straight onto the server through the use of tablets,” he said.
“I think as that business relationship develops, the agents will actually book their cattle directly into the system remotely, so as they’re booking more cattle in we’re able to build the sale catalogue so we know which vendors are supplying cattle. We can then advertise to stakeholders, particularly the buyers, what stock are available at Yass that week.”
Once this gets underway, the operators will have the option of moving pen allocation from 10am on the morning of the sale, where it presently occurs, to an earlier time.
“At the moment every agent at SELX has got their own access to the system and by typing in their user name and password, they’re able to access their livestock within that sale without seeing anyone elses,” Mr Newsome said.
“That means the agents can do a lot of their own work – they can print out the reports they need, they can get their own sale results quickly and communicate those prices back to the client.”
The program, Stockyard, does automated transactions with the Livestock Production Assurance database for the Extended Residue Program checks and National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) compliance information.
“As NVDs (national vendor declarations) are entered into the system as cattle arrive… as soon as the NLIS number is linked to an NVD it automatically goes to the NLIS database,” he said.
This automatically conducted checks, such as whether a tag was a legitimate number in the system.
Because the data was collected and reconciled as stock arrived, agents could arrive early on sale day and receive a summary of the stock in their run.
“By the time the agents start selling, the whole saleyard has been balanced and any particular issues that we’ve found in relation to non-reading tags, any tags or animals that vary from what was on the NVDs have all been resolved by our staff members the night before,” Mr Newsome said.
“As the cattle are sold, the buyer and price are entered electronically and that is then available in real time at the scales.”
This means as the cattle are delivered to the scales they don’t have to be in sale order, and can instead be delivered in buyer order which allows the operators to consolidate buyers’ lots ready for delivery.
“We’re able to improve our weighing speeds by having all that information before the scales,” Mr Newsome said.
“We’ve only had two sales (at the time of writing) but we’re already well ahead of industry averages. We’re currently putting them through in about 49 seconds per lot, whereas the industry leading saleyard is operating at about 37 seconds and the average saleyard is processing cattle at about 54 seconds.
“One of the ways we actually get such good processing efficiency is we’ve got two scales, so any lots of two or more that go through the facility go over the main weigh bridge, whereas all the single lots are processed on a different scale on the other side of the scale house.”
“We expect within a month or six weeks to have weighing speeds down around the best yards in the country.”
