INDUSTRY
Value chain
Information, traceability is power Jason Archer advocates combining beef animal identification, location with other data for better industry results.
S
itting down to write this article, I’m pondering “what is one thing that could make our beef industry better”? There are many answers to this question, but the one I’m going to address is the opportunity to use information and traceability up and down the value chain more effectively. This is something that should, in theory anyway, be relatively simple and we could realistically do something about as an industry in the next five years. It would support our industry’s strategy to capture premiums for our beef based on a great natural product which provides an excellent eating experience. I’m
aware that I’m banging a drum which has been beaten before - but surely addressing this must be getting more feasible from a technology viewpoint, and the benefits are increasing from a market viewpoint, so perhaps it is time we took another step? So what do I mean by information and traceability? Don’t we already have a traceability system in NAIT? Well, yes – we have traceability that deals with animal identification and location, primarily as a backstop for animal health management – particularly disease incursions. New Zealand’s recent Mycoplasma bovis experience has shown us how important that can be. But given that we have a
national identification scheme, and electronic tags in the ear of every cattle beast in NZ, what else could we be doing? We could use the system we have now to link the location and ownership history of an animal to other attributes and trace these attributes through the value chain. This would help retain value in the animal which is otherwise lost as it is transacted, especially in our beef industry where animals are frequently transacted two to three times in their lifetime before processing. This might best be explained by way of example which demonstrates how ownership transfers in the life of an animal
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Country-Wide Beef
May 2021