How sheep and goat producers can get eID ready

That's one of the main messages from sheep consultant Sally Martin of Sheep Metrix.

Ms Martin said even before the mandatory rollout dates were locked in, SheepMetrix had already organised workshops to help producers implement eID.

"Where we come in is helping people understand what that return on investment might be," she said.

"One thing is to purchase the tags but if you're actually going to collect information you are going to require some other equipment.

"That may be as simple as a stick reader or you buy some load cells and set of scales to do some body weights through to the kind of deluxe models with autodrafters and sheep handlers and software packages.

"The key thing is for producers to come back and say 'what's my breeding objective or my production objective, what am I trying to get out of this and what traits are going to be important for my business to capture'."

"The regulations are still based around the receiver being responsible for uploading the transaction but we still need to make sure if you're selling or have stock on agistment, that those movements if they are between two different property identification codes, that they're recorded on the NLIS database."

Ms Martin said even if producers were initially daunted about making the change, the technology could be used to further businesses in various ways ranging from selection to meeting market specifications.

"Initially when people walk through the door they're a bit overwhelmed as to what they've got to do and by the time we get to the end of the day they say, 'it's not as bad as I thought, I'm going to be able to do this and now I've got a plan'," she said.

"One thing I think is important to be really clear in what you want to capture in any data and whether you can get someone else to do it... or whether you do it yourself.

"Once you have a clear idea of what you want to capture you go out and find the gear that's going to be fit for purpose, rather than trying to retrofit something you might have found on special and figure out how it might work with your program.

"It's like anything, the more you use something the more potentially you will get out of it."

Ms Martin said if producers were only going to capture data once a year, it might make more sense to hire a service to do it but if they wanted to use the technology on a more regular basis, it might be a matter of upskilling.

"As a service with our business we go in and do a lot of fleece weighing and micron testing, so we can come into a shearing shed and capture all that information on behalf of a client... or it might be for ram breeders capturing some DNA sampling or doing some breech scoring to get some indication of what the distribution of breech score might be at lamb marking time so you can potentially transition to non-mulesed," she said.

"Or there might be someone in the business who is really keen to learn that new system and then they become responsible for it."

Ms Martin said producers unsure where to start could talk to a consultancy service, attend workshops or ask someone who they knew who had already made the switch how they had done it.

"The big thing is don't rush, don't think you have to buy something until you work out if it's going to be the best item for you," she said.

"It's having a list of questions and getting them answered and doing the homework."

Ms Martin said people needed to be aware of variation between state or territory's transition process when figuring out on-farm implementation.

"Be specific in what the different regulations will be for your particular state... just be mindful that there will be differences depending on your location," she said.

"Different states have different incentives and funding as well."