Monitor performance of cattle

01-05-2010 | Not Specified

New Zealand is known to have the best grass-fed beef in the world, but farmers need to monitor their cattle, says Silver Fern Farms national marketing manager Lynn Jaffray.

He encouraged farmers to monitor animal performance to provide information on what was working for a particular farm.

"If you are buying in animals from four different properties and then just selling them 12 months later without recording any data, you have no basis on which to analyse how they performed."

The source and trace tagging system owned by Performance Beef Breeders, and being trialled with Angus Pure, allowed farmers to monitor the performance of the tagged cattle throughout their life.

Access to this information came at a price, however, which had yet to be determined.

If he wanted to, a breeder could see how his cattle grew and how they performed on the hook. A potential purchaser could observe growth rates already achieved by the animal.

Electronic ID would be mandatory late in 2011 for cattle under the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) scheme. NAIT would introduce mandatory animal identification and recording requirements for cattle and deer farmers, meat processors and saleyards. Farmers will need to tag cattle and deer with electronic identifiers and record when they move animals between properties.

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