New Zealand wake up call on livestock RFID

"If we don't start getting organised in this area, we'll find in a year or two that some of our trade partners will say sorry, we can't take your milk and meat. Some companies already have a 2009 deadline in place. Consumers in the world know these systems are in place, they have the confidence to buy New Zealand products. What it goes back to is accountability - if something does go wrong, the party responsible will be held accountable, which makes people significantly more responsible than they might otherwise be. A lot of it is a customer perception of safety. Most meat and dairy food can be traced back to its company of origin and they can work out who might be the 10 or 15 farms that supplied it on that day, and from that define the specific farmer and more often than not, the specific animal but it's a major effort involving many hours of people's time at a period when urgency is often needed. With the new national traceability system being proposed by the Animal ID and Traceability Working Group (a joint industry and government initiative), we will be able to tell you what farm a particular product came from at the push of a button. We will be able to pinpoint the animal and its farm of origin in minutes. If every animal's treated exactly the same, day in, day out, traceability's very simple but when one animal requires special individual treatment, things get tricky. Take a mastitis cow -- that animal needs to have records that show it was withheld from the herd and its milk didn't get into the vat. Despite farmers' best efforts, antibiotics still get into the tanker. In the event that something like that happens, you need to be able to find the individual farmer and the animal responsible. We think we're doing a good job in dairying, and our customers seem to be telling us that. We think with our capabilities in managing large quantities of data from rural communications places like farms we can take that capability, which is tried and tested in the dairy industry, and adapt it for other industries, particularly in the commercial herds."