A
typical cattle producer objections to e-NLIS:
(e-NLIS: electronic-National
Livestick Identification Scheme)
By: (Cattle Producer - Charters Towers)
I attended an e-NLIS forum in Charters Towers which was an eye-opener.
One of the progressive and well known Charters Towers cattle producers said they have done 14,000 head over 4 years and have had no end of trouble. They use them to access the EU market through their own feedlot. The race readers are prone to problems and they usually resort to wand readers - which also have problems, resulting in manual reading of each tag to send tag numbers to the database. There are email problems with the electronic transfer of data to MLA.
One mob had to be read numerous times before a correct reading could be obtained before slaughter. The whole mob may have to be re-read each time until the total number reads correctly and the "lazy tags" are eliminated.
Bindaree Beef Principals were there and advised us to stop mandatory ID it if possible. There are a large number of "lazy tags" that do not read at meatworks level and hold up consignments which cost the producer and the processor money, but no guessing as to whose pocket the loss will eventually fall into. Tags are expected to have at least a 50% loss over any cow life span.
Botswana and Canada are the only two countries in the world who have trialed electronic ear tags - Botswana is a totally government funded scheme for the Rumen Bolus system to be applied to their 3 million cattle to identify and stop cattle from being smuggled out of Zimbabwe. The Quebec Province with $21.6 million of government money subsidising a mirror project to Australia's proposed NLIS, but only on 1.2 million cattle, is not working.
We are the only producer funded country who implemented NLIS. This scheme was offered by John Anderson via AQIS to the EU who supposedly advised us against using it at that time. Bindaree Beef cannot fill its market share of the EU quota because of the tag system - not enough producers were staying with it because of the problems involved. Our National Vendor Declaration mandatory trace back system which is still the most effective in the world would have been sufficient then and still is now.
Final result - the technology is terminally flawed and it may cost beef producers approximately $37 per head in direct and indirect costs. Afgorce and MLA are pushing introduction of e-NLIS hard on our behalf - and I was told by ABA members that a tag company has recently threatened ABA for trying to stop the program.
Seeing as a couple of tag companies will probably stand to gain around $100,000,000 million first up to tag the Aussie herd and then have a renewable calf resource I begin to wonder if there is a smell around bigger than a bottle of red wine. Could be they have decided to use us to be world leaders to coin a global market - just my bit of cynicism!
At three meetings 1,200 producers have voted 100% against mandatory e-NLIS. Roma has had a meeting since then. My personal feeling is that we will have an excess of frustrated producers trying to learn and keep their computer systems up and running. I have had 5 computers over an 18 year span to keep up with technology. They are costly, time consuming, and very troublesome. Not to mention the personal level of frustration between families and staff who will have to find the extra time to read and log tag numbers into the MLA database each time an animal is moved off a property for any reason, whether it be for agistment, saleyards sport, and no doubt eventually meatworks and export. There is a big push on for 100% tag compliance.
There will be an increase in serious accidents in the workplace. Stock will have to be rehandled on many occasions. Each time an animal is reworked within a short space of time (which will be unavoidable) they become more stressed and unpredictable. Stock handlers will also become stressed, particularly when they are being forced to perform an unnecessary operation. - this combination is deadly in an already dangerous industry. This scenario is unavoidable if this flawed technology is pushed upon us.
For those producers who have a useful application for electronic tags they will be prepared for any inconvenience they may cause - and if the scheme if not mandatory - there will not be dire consequences when a mob of cattle does not read correctly.
We were advised the only way to give the mandatory introduction of e-NLIS a jolt now is to write to Qld DPI Minister, Palaszczuk, Premier Beattie and our local and federal and state ministers with our concerns, which I shall do. It was strongly suggested that if we do not want this in our management program to say that we will not do it. The addresses are:
Hon.Henry Palaszczuk MP
Minister for Primary Industries & Fisheries
GPO Box 46
Brisbane Qld 4001
Email: dpi@ministerial.qld.gov.au
Hon. Peter Beattie MP
Queensland Premier
PO Box 185
BRISBANE ALBERT STREET 4002
Email:
By: (Cattle Producer - Charters Towers)
VOTE: AGAINST e-nlis | FOR e-nlis
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