AN extensive national sheep tracing operation recently identified the challenges of the country’s livestock monitoring system, which took 14 days to trace 14 sheep to their Victorian origins.
The operation followed an Australian consignment of 321 cattle which landed in Japan in May and had tested positive to Bovine Johne's disease.
However the difference was the cattle were traced from Japan, through the entire life-cycle of those cattle, onto 163 farms in five states, within one hour.
“If we are dealing with an outbreak situation, we won’t be dealing with 14 sheep, we will be dealing with thousands,” Victorian chief vet Charles Milne said.
“In fourteen days we were not able to trace 14 sheep to the same standards as we traced 321 cattle within an hour.”
Dr Milne has been a driving force behind Victoria’s controversial move to mandate electronic tags in sheep and goats which will be introduced next year.
“What you have in an electronic system is the recording of every movement which can be accessed immediately,” he said.
“When you work with visual mob based system, you have to physically trace those animals and verify those movements – by phoning agents, processors, and producers – to ensure the data is correct. That verification is a hugely time consuming process.”
While the Sheep Catcher Two operation was a part of an ongoing biosecurity exercise which began in 2009, it rang true to a situation Dr Milne was all too familiar with.
In 2001, he was working in the United Kingdom when the Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak caused a crisis in British agriculture and took nearly a year to eradicate.
Following the outbreak, the UK subsequently mandated electronic tags when another outbreak of FMD occurred in south-east England when Dr Milne was Scotland’s chief vet officer.
“I was able to, within 24 hours, trace all movements of cattle and sheep from south-east England to Scotland over the previous six to eight weeks,” he said.
“Having been through an outbreak situation and seeing the pain it has caused to the industry, anything we can to mitigate has got to be a good thing.”
Dr Milne said there was strong evidence that electronic tags would benefit the Victorian and Western Australian industry and provide a far more effective way of managing a disease outbreak than the current mob-based system which was failing the industry.
“The existing system needs to be strengthened and states have to choose how they do that,” he said.
“Ministers have agreed there should be 98pc short term traceability – tracing back to the premise sheep originated from in the past 30 days – and 95pc long-term traceability which is their lifetime.
“My own view is that that would be difficult to achieve with a mob based system.”
Dr Milne said the new regulations would not impede on cross-border trade, allowing interstate producers to consign visually tagged sheep to Victorian saleyards and abattoirs, provided they had identification in accordance with their state.
Agriculture Victoria was liaising with interstate processors who regularly slaughter Victorian sheep to assess the feasibility of installing tag readers in these plants.
“We recognise when there is a big change, there will be teething issues,” he said.
“We are proposing to phase-in compliance levels so people can work into the system with us and improve traceability over the first few weeks.”
Next month, Dr Milne will brief the country’s chief veterinary officers in Darwin on the outcome of Victoria’s industry consultation on mandatory electronic tags.
“All chief veterinary officers are supportive of having a strong traceability system,” he said.
WoolProducers Australia, Australian Sheep Meat Council, Goat Industry Council of Australia and the Australian Livestock and Property Agents have slammed the Victorian Government for abandoning the mob-based system.