successful, and saleyard movements can soon follow. B+LNZ farmer consultation suggests there’s strong support for such moves, he adds. “Covid-19 and M. bovis have done a lot to focus attention on how important traceability is.” To ensure all movements can be checked remotely in the event of a disease outbreak, eASDs would probably have to become mandatory in due course, with provisions made to allow farms with limited electronic communications to participate. That might be by recording the movement on an app in a phone such that when the phone next receives signal it would automatically download, or possibly by enabling agents or transports to record the movement in such situations. Similarly, the movement might be recorded through a meat company portal, or secure area of a stock agents’ website, in much the same way as dairy farmers use MINDA to record their stock movements for NAIT. Houston says it would be logical if development of eASDs and integration of sheep into the NAIT database went hand-
in-hand. However, he stresses sheep should not require ear tagging like cattle and deer: simply that a register of farms with sheep on them is needed for biosecurity purposes. “For highly infectious diseases that affect sheep, most notably foot and mouth, identification of the individual animal is not required, as it is movements of groups of animals between farms that must be investigated.” Another key factor in the design of a sheep traceability scheme is that they are less frequently traded than cattle, with about 80% of lambs going direct to slaughter. That means there’s little to be gained from making some form of property identifier – most likely a tag, electronic or visual – mandatory, and many farms use some form of identifier on ewes anyway. Most sheep farms also already have NAIT accounts for cattle or deer, so few would need to create new accounts if a sheep register was added to the NAIT database. All that would be needed would be for the NAIT account to link to eASD records so movements on/off properties could be traced. That way there would be no need for farmers to update their sheep register
whenever a movement is made: an annual declaration of stock numbers present would suffice. NAIT’s head of traceability, Kevin Forward, says it would be preferable for tracing if traded sheep (as opposed to direct to slaughter) did have some form of farmspecific identification, but other than that he echoes Houston’s view that eASDs and a comprehensive register of sheep farms is all that’s needed. “The problem with the current ASD system is it is paper, not electronic. That means in the event of an outbreak you have to go to each farm to look at the paper records.” However, to make eASDs mandatory will require new legislation so how fast a system capable of rapidly tracking all sheep movements can be put in place will come down to industry and political will. “The timeline will really depend on the Government of the day.” In the meantime, he urges any farms not already using eASDs for movements to meatworks to start doing so, and to adopt eASDs for farm-to-farm and farm-to-
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