Rangeland goat eID tag plan agreed, cost for sheep still concerns AgForce

AgForce Sheep Wool and Goats director and Blackall goat producer Anita Dennis said that thanks to months of work from the Goat Industry Council of Australia, with input from AgForce, guidelines have been agreed on that will allow harvesters to move rangeland goats that have had no management inputs, from property of origin direct to the abattoirs without being tagged.

"They will have to be accredited to be able to do that," she said. "It will be a three-year accreditation, and the DPI in each state will make sure that harvester is compliant with the guidelines."

Ms Dennis said depots would have 10 days to move goats tag-free.

"It's been a long consultation process and GICA has put a lot of work in," she said. "This is still with Safe Foods Australia but it looks like it will be approved."

RELATED: Goat producer says electronic tags will give credibility

AgForce Sheep and Wool board chair Steven Tully described it as a 'massive win', saying without it, the emerging goat industry would have been destroyed.

"It would have created a pest, that goats used to be once," he said.

He was not as complimentary of the lack of movement on the cost to producers to observe the incoming biosecurity requirement to tag all sheep, meaning that some adult sheep will be double tagged.

"Fifty million sheep are born in Australia each year, that's $100 million in tags, just for that mob," he said. "They're talking about double tagging, doing the older sheep, two age groups in one, so the ones you're selling and the ones that are born - that's $200 million just there."

He said the response from the federal government was that producers don't contribute to biosecurity much, which was disappointing.

"PwC has said, sheep eID tagging is going to cost $800 million over three years - that's a fairly large contribution to biosecurity," he said. "The federal government's contribution to that is $20 million."

RELATED: Call for sheep eID tagging costs to be shared

Mr Tully said the double-up cost - tagging adult sheep that had already been tagged in the marking cradle - meant they were slugged with the cost of a $2 tag potentially 48 hours before they were killed, which meant the tag went in the bin as waste, for no traceability benefit.

"We know they came from a property that they were born on, to the abattoir," he said. "We sell sheep in truckloads, it's $1600 for nothing."

Mr Tully said ordering double the number of tags from January 1, 2025 would also crash the system with manufacturers, who wouldn't have the capacity to ramp their production up to double the amount, and then let it drop back down.

"All of a sudden we're going to need 30 million extra tags a year, or 50 million, depending on how they're going to roll the system out," he said. "It's not going to happen - we want to avoid the disaster."

He also said lessons should be learnt from the experiences of the cattle industry managing a similar issue 20 years ago.

"We only have to remember, at the end of last year, it was taking us three months to get cattle tags," he said. "And it's going to be market value for six months."

AgForce's request is for the federal government to roll out a tagging incentive system to give sheep producers an incentive to begin tagging now.

"We want to get a win from the government so we can roll this out together, but we can't roll it out with the government if they're going to give us nothing," he said.

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