Traceability tags good farm management

Peter Bailey's commitment to animal traceability is more than rhetoric - it's skin deep, proven with his agribusiness consultancy, on his family sheep and beef finishing farm and, in recent years, as Multi Species Manager for Livestock Improvement. Peter and his son Hayden farm a 6000 stock unit property in Hawkes Bay rated in the top 15% of its farm class and together work to reap as much value from the land as possible. "Farming's never been a hobby for me; it's a passion. I do it because I love the life but I do it to make a living as well, and tagging and recording all my animals (beef and sheep) has meant I've been able to extract maximum profit from each animal, and every hectare of the farm. "We tag and record all the animals, including the sheep; to identify what are the best (and poorest) individual animals. The information we record can be related back to genetics but we still have a way to go with this, as we need to involve the whole breeding industry. "We also use Farmax, an animal mob based management and feed budgeting programme. I can model and monitor which is the most efficient farm system in any given situation around animal performance and feeding to financially optimise the business. For example I can calculate animal production per ha, work out my feed conversion efficiencies and live weight produced per ha." Twelve months ago, Peter jumped the fence and joined LIC (Livestock Improvement) as its Multi Species Business Manager to work on a project based around improving beef, deer and sheep productivity and traceability. "The prospect of compulsory animal ID is one of the most exciting for NZ livestock farmers "“ if only they'd realise it. Traceability is a by-product of the entire added value that an individual animal ID can provide in any animal management system."