Technical advisor for the Health 4 Wealth pilot Trials

Summary

Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) are undertaking the red meat pilot trials for the RR4P 'Health for Wealth project' and will be funded through this initiative. The red meat pilot trials are to enhance the utilisation and sharing of disease and defect data for the benefit of the supply chain. These nine month pilot trials tested the capturing and collection of disease and defect data during processing and will provide feedback to producers through either Livestock Data Link or alternative system chosen by the company.

The purpose of the project was to provide technical support to the eight processing companies in upgrading their systems to enable them to capture and report animal disease and defect data at a lot and individual based animal. This project assisted the eight companies with implementing the draft data standards for per-mortem information reporting across the major red meat species. In addition, this project provided the support to the software vendors to making the amendments required to capture, analysis and report disease and defect data as well validating the data collected.

Benefits to industry

The project has demonstrated the proof-of-concept that individual carcase disease and defect data can be effectively and efficiently transferred from beef to producers through existing industry infrastructure such as LDL and NLIS and/or through company owned proprietary feedback systems.

MLA action

The individual sheep disease and defect standard needs to be further tested and validated within supply chains due to issue around implementing individual carcase hook tracking technology.