Electronic National Vendor Declarations (eNVD) are being investigated as the key measure to improve the country’s failing traceability system for sheep and goats.
Sheepmeat Council of Australia believe the industry’s recommendations in response to Animal Health Australia’s Sheepcatcher II report, which revealed widespread failures of the mob-based traceability system, would meet national standards when the exercise was repeated in 2020.
Excerise Sheepcatcher II was conducted across the country between 2 June and 5 July, 2016, with the aim to compare the performance of Australia’s traceability systems with an exercise undertaken nearly a decade earlier.
The results showed mild improvement to previous 2007 exercise, however both consecutively failed to meet all Agricultural Senior Officials Committee (AgSOC) benchmarks for the National Livestock Identification system for sheep and goats.
Of the 60 sheep attempted to be traced in the exercise, Sheepcatcher II was able to verify 77 per cent of back-traced stock and 40pc of subsequent movements, compared with AgSOC’s 98pc and 95pc respective benchmark. After 14 days, the whole of life locations of nine stock remained unverified.
“One of the key things about any system is about making sure we know where the strengthens and weakness are,” Sheepmeat Council chief executive Kat Giles said.
“(The) industry welcomes the report in being able to pinpoint those for us and explain to us where our strengths are and also identify where we need to continue to enhance the system.”
Dr Giles said the report proved the current system can work, with the number of animals traced without verification reaching 90pc for back-traced stock and 97pc unverified whole-of-life movements of small stock.
One of the 18 recommendations released this week by SafeMeat includes an interim tracing exercise in 2020 to assess both mob-based and electronic identification of the national traceability system.
“(Sheepcatcher II) report indicated areas that need improvement, and one of the key ones for us is the NVD,” Dr Giles said.
“The electronic NVD has just been release by commercial providers, over the coming months we will be rolling out the eNVDs which will potentially be a large change for the industry.
“We have identified (NVDs) is one of the areas and we have got a mechanism to address that. Let’s put that in place and reassess after we have done that that - along with greater communications, more research and development and increase compliance around the traceability system - we believe by doing those things we will meet those traceability standards by the 2020 exercise.”
While only Agriculture Victoria has revealed the State's poor findings - which took 22 staff to track 14 sheep in 14 days for an inconclusive result - it is believed all State's failed to meet the National Livestock Performance Standards with the visual, mob-based system.
Western Australia and South Australia were among the worst performing in the exercise.
Despite the Victorian Government throwing more than $17 million at the industry to transition to mandatory electronic tags this year as a result of the state’s performance, Dr Giles remained adamant the national industry would pursue the current mob-based and tracing visual systems.
“Yes the report has shown there are areas that need enhancing and improving, but it has also shown that traceability system can work and that it does work, and we need to all work together to enhance where we can,” she said.
The exercise was conducted one month after an Australian consignment of 321 cattle landed in Japan last 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.
- The SheepCatcher II is available publicly via Sheepmeat Council of Australia and SafeMeat.