A key focus for the NSW Farmers goat committee is to ensure that decision makers understand the rangeland goat industry.
The operation of the NSW goat industry is not well understood.
This lack of understanding places the industry at risk of inappropriate regulation.
Often, regulators have limited understanding of the industry and rangeland producers’ operations.
The regulators often inappropriately equate the industry with other extensive industries, namely cattle and sheep.
This results in decisions to introduce inappropriate regulation that would have a detrimental impact on goat producers.
These dangers were clearly illustrated with recommendations targeted at rural crime announced last year.
There were several recommendations made for the goat industry that if implemented would have been damaging.
The key recommendations were to develop a licensing scheme for rangeland goat producers, greater record keeping requirements for goat depots, and strengthening traceability compliance.
NSW Farmers strongly opposed these recommendations.
It highlighted that the areas the recommendations targeted were already covered through various industry enhancements.
Had these recommendations been implemented, they would have only created an additional administrative burden on lawful goat producers.
The industry already had systems for goats to be tracked and ownership determined, and these are audited for compliance.
The committee demonstrated the duplicative nature of the recommendations and was successful in them being abandoned, and no further requirements being placed on industry.
However, this successful outcome was only possible due to the vigilance of the committee.
Goat traceability requirements are an area that requires constant awareness.
We have been successful in ensuring NSW retains a mob based traceability system and that the tagging exemption for harvested rangeland goats is maintained.
There is constant discussion on the tagging requirements for harvested rangeland goats, and there was recently a push to require harvested rangeland goats to be tagged after 10 days.
We successfully argued such a time period was not sufficient for producers to manage the uncertainties within the industry.
Producers need sufficient time to harvest, aggregate, market and offload goats.
They also need to be able to manage the uncertainty around numbers and condition of animals prior to and following muster, the availability of kill space, access to depots, weather and road conditions.
Finally, the committee also works hard to ensure that official documents accurately describe the industry.
As an export focused industry, it is vital that official documents precisely portray a producer’s rangeland goat operation.
Throughout this year, there has been a number of occasions when the committee has had to request changes to documents.
These incorrect statements are made out of ignorance, but they place our international markets at risk.
The benefit of this work is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that without it, goat producers and the industry would be far worse off.
- Katie Davies is the NSW Farmers goat committee chair woman.
