Participants in SA's sheep and goat supply chain are being encouraged to fill out an online survey on traceability and the proposed national individual identification of sheep and goats.
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In July the national and state agriculture ministers agreed to work towards a national system and in September it was revealed the proposed roll out date for mandatory electronic identification tags is January 1, 2025.
Ultimately though it will be up to each state government to bring this into effect.
Prior to the announcement, Livestock SA had advertised for and appointed a Sheep & Goat Traceability Steering Committee which comprises 12 members from a broad cross section of industry and independent chair Peter Treloar, who is a former MP and Edililie sheep producer.
The committee has held two scoping meetings and recently met with consultant ACIL Allen, who they have appointed to engage with sheep and goat producers, agents, accumulators, feedlots, processors, and saleyards, to investigate the business case for eID in sheep and goats.
The survey aims to give anyone involved in the supply chain a say and ensure any of their concerns about additional costs and other issues are documented.
Livestock SA president Joe Keynes is urging as many people as possible that will be impacted to complete the survey to ensure their issues are identified and factored into any proposed changes.
He acknowledges for some it will be a a relatively simple change in tag type or scanning process but for others, particularly saleyards there will be more substantial infrastructure costs incurred to read these tags.
"The steering committee and Livestock SA have heard producers' concerns regarding exemptions for lambs that are vendor bred direct to slaughter, and rangelands goats and we are working through each of these scenarios for our state," Mr Keynes said.
"We have also heard there will be additional costs through the supply chain, so we need to look for the best way to deal with these costs because ultimately the cost of not meeting national traceability standards is a greater risk to the future profitability, market access and emergency animal preparedness for our industry.
"While this work needs to fit into a nationally harmonised system, we are focused on making sure any overarching national traceability recommendations suit our state's supply chain."
The federal government announced in last week's budget that it was allocating $46.7m to develop improved livestock traceability systems, but how much of this will go towards a national sheep and goat eID system is not yet clear.
