THE Department of Agriculture and Food (DAFWA) plans to monitor the introduction of mandatory electronic identification of sheep and goats in Victoria.
The Victorian Government last week announced mandatory electronic tags for sheep and goats, where all lambs born in Victoria, from 2017 onwards, must be fitted with an electronic identification tag.
While the State's systems varies from WA, DAFWA livestock biosecurity acting director Peter Gray said DAFWA would monitor and assess any improvement in Victoria's ability to demonstrate the required National Livestock Traceability Performance Standards.
He said WA had an excellent reputation for producing safe, quality food for lucrative international markets.
"Traceability of sheep underpins the food safety and market access for sheep meat products," he said.
"Traceability is important for disease control, enabling animals to be efficiently traced during a disease outbreak to support containment and control activities."
While Victoria has adopted mandatory tagging, WA will continue its three steps to sheep traceability:
* Visual identification on the animal, through the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) ear tag and earmark.
* The National Vendor Declaration (NVD) waybill that accompanies the movement of animals from one property identification code (PIC) to another.
* Electronic record of movement on the NLIS database.
In WA, the Biosecurity and Agriculture Management (Identification and Movement of Stock and Apiaries) Regulations introduced in 2013 require sheep and goat producers to use either electronic or visual identification on their animals.
"Electronic identification is not widely used due to the increased cost of electronic tags and absence of scanning infrastructure for electronic identification of sheep or goats at livestock congregation points such as saleyards, export depots and abattoirs," Mr Gray said.
"WA's visual transaction tagging system differs from all the other jurisdictions.
"The WA system requires sheep and goats to be given a year of birth colour tag for the property of birth and subsequent pink transaction tag (with PIC or brand) for subsequent properties when the animal changes ownership.
"This allows WA to match up PICs from the animal's ear tag with NVD paperwork."
With investment from the State Government's Royalties for Regions program, DAFWA established a dedicated sheep NLIS help-desk in late 2014 to assist WA sheep producers with all aspects of sheep traceability including recording sheep movement in the database.
* More information: email the sheep NLIS help-desk at sheep. nlis@agric.wa.gov.au or phone 9363 4150.
