Supporting industry compliance and productivity gains through integrated online systems

Summary

The Australian red meat industry, through Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), supports industry compliance and productivity through a range of industry value chain-based programmes. These are a mixture of online (National Livestock Identification System (NLIS), electronic National Vendor Declaration (eNVD), Livestock Data Link (LDL), Meat Standards Australia Australia (MSA), National Feedlot Accreditation Scheme (NFAS) and partially online (Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) - assessment) programmes.

While farmer uptake of these systems is satisfactory, there are opportunities to increase compliance and increase adoption through streamlining management systems with integrity systems. These opportunities can be supported by increasing value gained and reducing the complexity in using these systems. Value can be increased by linking on-farm data to on farm productivity gains, processor feedback (LDL and my MSA) along with meeting compliance requirements (LPA) and an overall, reduction in workload that comes with the duplication of effort (e.g. double entry of data) to use systems.

To gain feedback on these systems and the industry status more widely, meetings were held with a range of industry participants along the value chain. This included farmers, bankers, investors, processors, stock agents, vets, rural support agencies and a range of MLA staff. The industry context and information requirements of these participants was discussed.

There werea range of views on the type of information collected, utilised and shared. With respect to farmers (and processors), at one extreme there is minimal information collected and only the bare minimum used to meet compliance needs. At the other end of the spectrum there are sophisticated users who are linked to the market through the processor utilising farm, processing and market related information to support compliance, productivity and provenance.

The meeting outcomes were supported through a value chain workshop held at feedlot. This group consisted of breeders, vets, nutritionists, meat companies, software providers and the feedlot management team. The workshop provided an improved view of the information required to support the spectrum described and information system suggestions to support industry uptake and use.

Outcomes from these workshops and meetings suggest that a multi-level framework or platform model be developed for Integrity System Company (ISC) core systems, which support digital compliance tools through to combining compliance with base productivity information and processing feedback data.

The core system (communications exchange platform) needs to be constructed in a manner that allows sharing as widely as permitted by the data owner to support ‘once only’ data entry and overall sector performance. The core system should link seamlessly to ‘commercial’ systems (product and transactional exchange platforms) facilitating two-way transfer of data.

There are many challenges in providing this core system including less than ideal internet access (especially in farm work areas), familiarity with mobile systems (e.g. using mobile phones for data entry rather than a paper notebook) linking data seamlessly (e.g. reading EID tags), creating easy system linkages for data share and motivating chain participants to change historical behaviours (e.g. sharing data).