Department of Primary Industries and Regions

eID and traceability across the supply chain

Duration: 2:03 420 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Biosecurity is often perceived merely as a government mandate or bureaucratic jargon, but for agricultural producers and industry stakeholders, it fundamentally represents business security essential for maintaining export markets. The reliance on international trade means that an outbreak of exotic diseases can trigger a national standstill where no stock can be sold by farmers or agents, causing even consultants to face complete operational paralysis. The financial impact of such outbreaks is overwhelmingly driven by lost market access rather than direct costs, resulting in significant revenue losses that ultimately drain the pockets of individual farmers and threaten the long-term sustainability of their enterprises. To mitigate these severe economic risks, there is an urgent need for a robust traceability system capable of quickly identifying and eradicating disease outbreaks to reopen export channels as fast as possible. A critical shift from traditional paper-based records and visual tags to electronic identification (EID) systems addresses the inherent limitations of manual data entry by eliminating human error. Historically, farmers have struggled with accurately filling out National Vendor Declarations before trucks depart, particularly when recording Property Identification Codes for animals sourced from other properties; EID technology drastically improves accuracy and efficiency by removing much of this reliance on memory and handwriting, ensuring that critical movement data is recorded correctly every time. Beyond simply reducing errors in record-keeping, the adoption of electronic identification unlocks new opportunities to analyze individual animal performance rather than relying solely on mob-based averages that have defined industry practices for decades. This granular level of detail allows producers to see variations in productivity and health among specific animals that were previously invisible under traditional systems. By tracing individuals accurately, the industry can make more informed management decisions based on precise data, ultimately enhancing overall efficiency while providing a clear pathway to proving disease freedom when necessary.

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Often when people hear the word biosecurity, [music] they think of it as just one of those government words that gets thrown around. As producers, we should be thinking more of it as business security. We rely very heavily in our export markets in being able to prove that our products are [music] safe. In an exotic disease outbreak, we will go through a national standstill. Producers can't sell stock, agents [music] can't sell stock. Even for us as consultants, everything comes to a grinding halt in that moment. [music] And when we hear some of these numbers thrown around about what an exotic disease outbreak might cost us [music] as an industry, the vast majority of that is in our lost markets. And the vast [music] majority of that money is coming out of farmers' pockets. So, the farmers and and the rest of us in the industry, we should be desperate for a traceability system [music] that actually helps us nail these exotic disease outbreaks as quickly as possible so that we can prove that it's eradicated and get our export markets opened up as quickly as we possibly can. It's incredibly important to the the long-term sustainability of our businesses. One of the most [music] significant factors in the change from a traditional paper-based system and visual tags to an AID system [music] is it takes away some of that risk of human error. While we're just heavily reliant on people filling out an NVD, when the reality is for lots of people, the NVD [music] is the piece of paper they have to fill out quickly before the truck leaves. It's it's actually an incredibly important piece of paper, but it also relies heavily on everyone writing down the PIC numbers [music] of any animals that are that are from a another property that are on their place that are now leaving. But, that's not been [music] done historically very well by farmers. The the introduction of AID takes so much of that human element [music] away that drastically improves the accuracy and the efficiency of the whole process. It gives us the chance to be able to look at individual animal performance rather than just the mob-based and average-based system [music] that we've been operating on for so many years. There's so much variation in performance within individuals that we've just never been able to see because we haven't been able to trace the individuals. Now, we've got that [music] opportunity in front of us.