Industry gears up for ID challenge

12-05-2010 | Jackie Harrigan

D-Day for national identification of all cattle is coming and the industry is gearing up for the challenge of identifying the movements of New Zealand's national herd of 11 million cattle.

Allflex, and Aleis, an Australian company which is the world's largest manufacturer of livestock RFID (radio frequency identification) devices and readers, have set up a permanent display site in the Wairarapa to demonstrate their equipment and systems.

Aleis CEO John Finlayson says the range of equipment installed at Gold Creek farm makes it the first site in the world set up to show the latest high-flow RFID reader systems for multiple species - cattle, sheep and deer.

The equipment focuses mainly on commercial solutions for saleyards and slaughter houses, but also features RFID readers for large sheep operations and units attached to sheep-handling equipment to show the interface with on-farm management systems.

There are huge advantages to having animals electronically identified and automatically capturing data from them to use in farm management decision-making, Finlayson says.

"Many people in the industry have said reading of multiple stock couldn't be done, but it can, with 100% accuracy, which is what is demanded by the industry in Australia. Here we can show it," he says.

NAIT chairman Ian Corney told representatives from saleyards companies that he was confident the NAIT system would be ready to implement by the start date of October 1, 2010.

"Of course there will be issues to be sorted out, but we need to be as pragmatic as possible and sort them out as we go along."

Although he would not say when implementation was likely for pigs and sheep, Corney says identification of both species "are on the horizon" and that the national database will be built with the capability to accommodate all species.

"All species are very important for 100% biosecurity for New Zealand."

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