November 2011 - National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT)
The following article was written by Kath Standage and first published in CRT's Agline magazine, November 2010 issue.
Your neighbour’s prize bull is a hard dog to keep on the porch. Hoping that your cows might succumb to his rugged charms he leaps the boundary fence and lands on your property to try his luck. You telephone your neighbour and make arrangements for the errant Casanova to be retrieved by herding him and the cows into your yards, loading him onto a truck and sending him home.
As the bull is part of your neighbour’s existing capital stock and as it is during the transition period of 3 years from the implementation of NAIT, the bull is not RFID tagged. 
Given that the bull has left your farm, are you in breach of the requirements under NAIT? Is the truck driver who transported the untagged bull back to the neighbouring farm in breach of his obligations under NAIT?
Your cattle have all been tagged with RFID tags. You muster them from the back block into the yards for TB testing at which time you realise that you are five cattle short. You assume that those five cattle have died. Pursuant to the requirements of NAIT you record the death of those cattle at the property. However, sometime later when you get the herd in it appears that the missing cattle “have come back to life”. What do you do?
Should sheep farmers be concerned that once the hand brake is let off the NAIT rolling truck will include sheep?
These are some of the issues that may be of concern to farmers once the NAIT scheme becomes compulsory in November 2011 for cattle and in November 2012 for deer. Once NAIT becomes mandatory, all newborn cattle and deer must be tagged with compliant RFID tags within 6 months of birth and before the animal leaves the property. The only exception is for bobby calves less than 30 days old going direct to slaughter.
NAIT should serve to enhance bio security, preserve New Zealand’s food safety reputation overseas and satisfy increasing consumer pressure for traceability of food products. There will also be more tangible on farm benefits to those farmers who choose to embrace the available technology to accurately record production details, weight and health information for individual animals.
As yet, the legislation for NAIT has not been drafted, but if NAIT is to work effectively and if the benefits to farmers are to outweigh the costs and additional burdens placed on them it will be vital for those drafting the legislation and for those responsible for establishing the structures necessary to operate NAIT to ensure that compliance and enforcement costs do not penalise the majority of farmers who will no doubt comply with the system and for the processes and methods of collecting data and submitting it to be as straight forward as possible.
The select committee process through 2011 will provide a limited opportunity for interested parties to have their say about NAIT’s data and what legal protections will be put in place regarding access to and use of data.
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