 Welcome to this tech talk, EID in commercial sheep and cattle enterprises for profitability and productivity. Our speaker today is Nathan Scott from Achievag Solutions. Nathan has a background in prime lamb and merino wool production and a passion for improving the productivity and profitability of livestock enterprises. He works with producers to increase conception rates, improve lamb survival, lift growth rates and hone overall management. Nathan is a provider of advice in the practical use of electronic identification within commercial sheep and cattle enterprises. Nathan also provides advice to individual clients, producer groups and works within a range of industry projects. He is based in Inverley in Victoria. Thanks Nathan. So my topic for today is electronic ID and I guess the bit that's most important to me is what's in it for you? What can you actually get out of it? Before we even get to that, I just want to start with a simple question. What excites you about the sheep and beef industry right now? And most people will say prices and yep, they're pretty exciting, but if I bought a 15 year old kid in, sat them down in front of you and said, explain to them everything that's exciting about the sheep and beef industry. I wonder what you'd tell them. Now I ask the same question in rooms full of people all the time and I tend to get the same very blank looks. We don't have a lot of innovation and progress that we can point to. If I'm really mean and I pick on the sheep industry for a moment, we started out with a handpiece that looked like this. Sure it might have been a bit narrower, but we started out with a handpiece that looked like this. And now we've got blue ones, red ones and yellow ones and that really frustrates me. I get told all the time that farmers won't change. I think that's crap. If that was true, I wouldn't have a job and you wouldn't all be here listening to this webinar. This next video I want to show you is actually one of our clients. I think he's one of the best examples of implementing change that I've ever seen. He is a true innovator and while this video, so the video has been made by TrueTest, showcasing a whole lot of their equipment. What I really want you to focus on is Gordon's approach to progress and adopting new technologies and making change within his business. I'm Gordon Brown. I've been a farmer. I was born into the industry. I've been in it all my life. When I was younger, you'd have a crowbar and a shovel, a race and bit drill, no electricity, no cordless drills. Tools we now have to work with are fantastic. If you start talking about EID tagging systems to keep controlling your livestock is a huge improvement. There's a lot of livestock that go across the borders. Swapping state to state that needs to be controlled. As a manager, you're going to make decisions for the well-being and property of the livestock. You can make decisions with informed data. It begins, obviously, by purchasing the tags. We manually insert a tag in their ear. We've got this set of scales, a three-way drafter. Every animal sends its wing off its mother's run through there to record the weight. We've got a spreadsheet with the top producing animals and the lower producing so that decides whether we exit them or what sidelines, what genetics we use. There's many tools in our toolbox that we can use if we have the information in front of us to make that decision. I think there's huge improvements to the lamb industry and this is all possible by using EID tags. This made it easier, less guessing, more positive results, better for the industry, more profits. Win-win situation. It's a no-brainer to me. I'm in boots and all. Farming is a tough gig. There's a lot of manual work, a lot of dust, a lot of heat, a lot of cold. We've got to use tools to improve the results. If we've got something that'll assist us, we've got to move forward and jump on board with that. Thanks again to TrueTest for letting us use that video. If you want to be better, the only way you can be better is to change. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If we want to be better, we have to change. With that in mind, I want you to start thinking about what it is that you actually want to achieve. What is it you actually want to achieve? Is it straight-out profitability? Are you trying to improve the productivity? Are you trying to reduce your costs? Do you want better animals? I'd ask, do you actually even know what your animals are currently doing? What their current level of performance is? Do you understand the variation that exists within them? That's what we want to have a look at. We start thinking for a moment about individual animal management. In any population, we have what is called a bell-shaped curve. A bell-shaped curve represented essentially by poor performers, average performers and superior performers. We know it exists. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about a population of people, dogs, cats, sheep, cows. This concept of population dynamics exists. If we look at the way I'm just going to use a sheep example for a start. The traditional mob-based system, while we will identify poor performers in terms of true cults, what tends to happen is we keep the same range of performance across every age group within the flock. And then, eventually, we kick them out because they've had a birthday. And we have this same range of performance. We've got poor performers that stay in the flock all the way through, simply because we don't know who they are. In cattle, it's exactly the same. Obviously, we keep them for more years, which means that if we have got poor performers, then we're keeping them in for even longer. So, if we just flip over for a moment now and we look at what an individual animal management system might look like, really, this is about making sure we can find those poor performers. Now, clearly, for different traits, that's going to look different as to when you can actually capture that information, capture enough evidence to kick something out. If we can identify those poor performers, though, and kick them out as early as we possibly can, it then allows us to retain just the best performers within our flock. That's made up of what were the average and the superior performers. And while we still might kick most of them out because they've hit a certain age, and we know that often with livestock, the older they are, the more health problems we start to encounter, we also know that some of those older stock are some of the best performers on the whole farm. If your system sees you kicking out any dry cows or any dry ewes, then the fact that an older ew or cow is still in your system means that she has to have been a good performer. The fact that she's even there means that she's been performing over the years. So, maybe it's worth running some of these best, some of our best performers around for longer, because they will be some of the best genetics on your whole farm, even if they are a little bit older. So this is the clear difference between a traditional mob-based system and the ability to find those passengers early on and kick them out and capitalize on the best performers in your flock or herd. We're basically taking this bell-shaped curve, and we're giving it a shove. Within that generation, we've immediately changed the average performance simply by dropping the bottom end out, and that's exciting. So there are a couple of different things that we've got to be thinking about though when it comes to individuals. So there is the generational gain, which is what we just talked about, cutting the bottom off out of a whole generation of animals. And there's genetic gain, which is cumulative. And the two go hand in hand. Obviously, there's differences for different traits in terms of heritability and repeatability. Repeatability is particularly important for that generational gain. And heritability, obviously very important for genetic gain. Different traits are going to be different for each of those. We need to think about where your genetics are actually even coming from. So we spend a lot of time selecting bulls, selecting rams, making sure that we're getting exactly the right genetics. And that is absolutely important, don't get me wrong. But I want you to think about the progeny themselves, the animals we're producing, where are their genetics coming from? Because it's not just him. 50% of the genetics of your progeny are coming from the use and the cows on your farm. And if we're not applying any selection pressure from that end, then we're missing out on an opportunity. So it brings us back to this same question. What do you want to achieve? Now if that's kilograms of beef produced per hectare, we'll just use that example at the moment. The only way to actually measure that, first of all, stocking rate, second of all, calf weight, calf growth rates. That's the only measure of kilograms of beef per hectare and your only way of tracking your progress or performance in that area. And if you want to actually make some sort of change, implement some sort of change on farm in relation to applying selection pressure to cows, the only way you can do that is to have it linked back to the cow through pedigree. Now that's a whole other subject and we'll touch on it a bit later on. But if it's kilograms of beef per hectare that's driving the oil and we know that's the key KPI for beef breeder program, if it's kilograms of beef per hectare, then the only way you can do that is to know your stocking rate and measure your calf growth rates. And ideally, if you want to apply selection pressure, link it back to the cow. Now if we have a look at a sheep example, the sheep CRC did some great work looking at the variation in fleece value within commercial flocks. And what they found was that the top 25% had a fleece value of $82 based on fleece prices at the time, or wool prices at the time. The average for that group of animals was only 54, which tells us that the bottom 25% weren't doing a hell of a lot, $37 in fleece value. Now if we have a look at number of lambs weaned for commercial marine operation at the same time, they found that the top 25% was marking 100 or weaning 143% lambs. The average for the group of animals was only 86%, and that tells us that the bottom 25% genuinely were doing stuff or marking 28% lambs. Now in all reality we know that some of the use that are making $37 worth of fleece value are actually producing 143% lambs. We also know that some of the use that are cutting $82 worth of wool probably only marking around 28% lambs. But we also know that some of the use that are cutting $82 worth of wool are also weaning 143% lambs. Some of the use that were only cutting $37 worth of wool were only weaning 28% lambs. The reality is, within your own flock, you just don't know which ones they are. Now this example shows from a commercial flock again, this is a thousand weaners measured for fleece weight and micron. And while we know that with increasing fleece weight we tend to get an increasing micron, that's the genetic correlation, the reality is within a commercial flock that relationship's pretty weak because we've got so much variation. So we've got some of the weaners here that are cutting big cuts at fine microns while others are cutting very little and at quite fine microns. So that variation certainly exists. If we convert the data over to dollars per head, then clearly there's a significant range there. We've got some sheep that are only cutting less than $30 worth of wool while within the same group of animals, there's some that are doing over $70 worth of wool. And it has to make you ask the question, what are these ones actually doing there? Why are they still in the flock? Particularly if it's a wool-focused flock. Now, for those of the beef producers that are listening, there's a lot of sheep examples here because we've got a lot more traits to actually look at in sheep and that we can influence. This is just another example from one of our commercial clients just looking at growth rates from birth to weaning. Now we used to try and aim for 300 grams a day as a target growth rate for lambs. Look at this example at how many of them are doing more than 400 grams a day and how many of them are actually doing more than 500 grams a day. The average for this group was 385 grams a day and they're actually bred from maternal lambs so they're not even the best possible growth rate genetics that there are in the country. We know that if we added some high growth terminals over the top we can lift that even further. It's bloody exciting. And if we can link it all back to a youth, then we can start to put some numbers around what that youth is actually producing for us. So this is kilograms of lamb weaned per youth and converted into dollars, how much did she actually produce for us? Now you can see we've assumed some prices up there which aren't terribly relevant to today's prices but we're not sure that today's prices are going to be around forever either so looking at $5 a kilo for store lambs, $5.50 for trade and $5.20 for heavy exports that's what's been used in this equation. And look at the variation. We've got some sheep there that are struggling to produce $100 worth of lamb in a year while others are well over $200. It makes you ask the question again, what are these guys still doing there? And if we put it together over two years then obviously we get even more variation. Some have still only just done over $100 over two years while others are over $400 worth of lamb produced in an over two year period. It certainly makes you wonder about those bottom sheep. And one of the reasons that we're interested in knowing who our best and worst performers are is that the humble weather has gone missing from our system. Now as more sheep and beef operations have gone to fully breeder based systems to be able to run at your optimum stocking rate you need a release felt. Now historically that was always something like weathers or whether it was in the cattle system it might have been whether you hold steers for longer or whether you offload them. But ultimately we need a release valve something that we're not emotionally attached to and the reason I say emotionally attached to we know that people who have got breeders are much less likely to sell them than if they were just a weather or some trade steers or something like that. And the reason we need a release valve is if we're running at our optimum stocking rate and the season goes against us you need something you can offload quickly and if we are a 100% breeder system then that makes it very difficult to do. So we've spent all this time so far we haven't even talked about EID at all we've talked about what sort of data you might like to collect and what sort of information we actually need to be able to capture to make better decisions. So why use EID? It's more accurate, it's easier, it's faster and therefore in my opinion it's more likely to happen. But you might ask why hasn't EID if it's all of these things hasn't it been implemented already across the industry? It's been around for over 25 years and I think the real answer to that is the equipment just wasn't ready and over this last, particularly over this last 10 years but even in the last 5 years we've seen equipment become more user friendly and the range that's available to producers makes it a lot more appealing. So where do we start? My answer is start simple. Don't over complicate your system particularly when you're first starting out Don't go and buy every single piece of equipment that you might be able to use. Start simple, understand what you're trying to achieve and buy the equipment that's going to make that life make your life that little bit easier in capturing that information. Now one of the simple things to get your head around for a start is this concept of what we call a bucket file. Now a bucket file is what gets sent to you when you order your tags. I'm sure some of you have got them and never used them, seen them, but don't understand really what their role is. Basically what a bucket file does when we scan a tag it produces an RFID number. On the outside of a tag is a visual number that's printed and the bucket file basically grabs both of these numbers and puts them together in a file for you. So if you read the number on the outside of a tag you can actually know what the match it back to what the electronic number is when you scan its tag. So how can we use this? Now this again is a bit of a sheep example but you can do the same thing in cattle. The simplest possible use of EID is not reading the tags at all with an electronic reader. Just use your bucket file for a start. So on the outside of your tags you order them printed with a visual number. What we can do is use your bucket file to then know which tags we've put into which sheep. And that is your simplest win you're going to get. The way we can do it is at landmarking all you need to do is write down the sequence of tags that go into particular groups of lambs. So if we bring in twin born lambs from a particular group of size for instance that might be 1 to 1,752. You write that down so that you know that that's the sequence of tags that's gone into them. We then use your bucket file to know that these are the electronic tag numbers that correspond to those visual numbers and you can use that for drafting in order to display that information any time you want it in the future. For most of my clients all I ever really want them to track is simply birth status. So in other words what was a lamb born as? Was it born as a twin or a single? Because they can record at lamb marking easily either using a reader or even just as I said using the bucket file and then beyond that it's pregnancy status in news. Now the reason I want those two in particular the birth status means that I don't stuff things up later on. If I'm going through and I'm classing animals we tend to pick the biggest, fattest, shiniest ones. Now if that's in Wieners that's almost always going to be singles and we've seen that historically in Moreno operations for the last 100 years. It's the single lambs that are favored because they're the ones that have grown out the best and they look the best when we start classing our youths. So we should only ever really be classing one group of animals that are all the same in other words singles comparing to singles and twins comparing to twins because if we compare a single to a twin then chances are we're going to keep the twins out. Particularly if we don't know it was a twin. So I want to know whenever we're doing any classing, whenever we're looking at a group of animals or making a culling decision I want to know was it born as a twin or a single. When it comes to birth pregnancy status, sorry, in the youths I want to know that too because that's simple data that we can collect so easily at scanning. The pre-scanners some of the pre-scanners are already set up to record it automatically for you so that's fantastic but even if they're not all you actually have to do is just run the shape around at some point between now and when you start boxing everything back up after marking and just scan the tags of the youths you can just name a file in your reader twin bearing orange tags for instance and just read all of that mob so that you know that everyone in that file was a twin bearing orange tag youth. Really simple, I like simple EID systems if that's what we're going to do and as for a simple cattle example if you're able to record the date of birth for calves for individual calves then you can actually adjust and work out true growth rates now the problem that often happens is we tend to see a favouring of the early born calves now that's not really a problem because we do want to pick animals that are conceiving on the first cycle ideally but if we've got a calf that is growing exceptionally well on a second cycle and it's caught up or overtaken first cycle born calves then you're probably going to want to know about it so just simply knowing when a calf was born and putting that date of birth so that you can know at a particular point, so at weaning for instance what their individual growth rate has been then that can help adjust your selection decisions we know that if a calf is born a month later and those calves have been growing at sort of one to two kilos a day over an extended period of time then all of a sudden we can have a significant difference in their life rate so just simply being able to adjust your selection or culling decisions based on information is a great reason to be using EID of course you don't need EID necessarily to be able to do it you could do it with a visual system but as we have and will talk about EID just makes that bit more accurate now while there are a million different things that you could record in between the more complex that I'm about to show you is how we can actually put it all together using pedigree so this next process, this next video is going to show you pedigree matchmaker in action now all it is we've already mounted on a single file entrance out in the paddock so that it records the use and lambs as they pass and using some software that allows us to match lambs back to use now it's not a perfect system, it's not simple to implement because if you've got conditions where water isn't a great attractant then it won't work terribly well you can use grain as an attractant to try and get the sheep to walk in and out all the time, it's not straightforward but it certainly can work and we've used a lot of this success and there are newer technologies that are going to certainly supersede it with proximity tags and those things but this just gives you an idea of how the system works now we've actually done exactly the same thing with beef cattle, obviously the panels are a bit bigger but the system was quite simple to implement it's all, whether it's sheep or cattle it's simply a case of trying to get the stock to walk through single file to something now water when things are dry is a fantastic attractant but the minute we start getting into winter when water is no longer an attractant things start to get muddy and particularly with the cattle we found they made a hell of a mess in and around the trough or when we tried to use hay as an attractant it makes a hell of a mess so you've got to have your timing right for pedigree to make it work the whole reason we're interested in it though those graphs that I showed you earlier graphs like these ones are something that we simply can't achieve for pedigree so this one is the kilograms of lamb weaned per you you'll notice the gap through the middle of the graph that's the difference between singles and twins and if you look at those dots right up the top there's a group of dots up there sort of above the 90 kilogram mark they're all triplets now often we'll have someone say to us oh I just want one good lamb just give me one good single lamb this graph shows you that one good single lamb cannot compete with twins and twins cannot compete with triplets in terms of productivity clearly, particularly with triplets there's a whole other ball game there in terms of lamb survival but in terms of productivity at the gate singles can't compete with twins twins can't compete with triplets we showed you this one earlier converted to dollars it shows you just how much range there is it makes you wonder why we've still got these sheep in the system and again if we put it together over two years this is how much variation we start to see amongst the animals the same thing can be done for cattle in terms of calf growth rates matching them back to the cow if we really want to get complex though and this is obviously taking it to a whole other level I'll just explain what you're looking at in this graph up the left hand side we've got kilograms of lamb weaned across the bottom we've got the used live weight and the color of the dot tells you the condition score of the U at weaning up the left hand side we've got kilograms of lamb weaned over the U at weaning now this is pretty complex data but it shows us that those animals down in the bottom right hand corner of the graph are our high U weight high condition score used who haven't weaned very much in the way of lamb meanwhile we've got some animals at the far left side low condition score, low weight some of them have low weaned as a decent amount of lamb and there's a few dots right in the middle which are right where we want to be towards the top end but in the center of the graph 60 kilo U's condition score 3.5 weaning over 60 kilos of lamb they're the sorts of sheep that we really like we want sheep that can maintain condition score, wean us a decent amount of lamb and not be enormous we want pygmies that produce elephants not the other way around so these guys often they're the ones that would actually come through looking fat and shiny and weaning they're the ones that you think oh those who's have done well they've done well because they've done stuff all so why? what are we actually doing any of this for? that's the same question I want you to ask yourself all the time when you start looking at EID as a concept what is it that you're trying to achieve why are we using the technology in the first place imagine a dairy farmer milking cows morning and night and not paying any attention to how much milk went into the vat there's not a chance that they would do it imagine a cropper putting their crop in and just working out what the total ton of wheat for the whole farm work and not paying any attention to which paddocks perform better than others these days we want to know which part of the paddock it came from and yet in sheep and beef this is essentially what we're doing we're not tracking individual performance anywhere near well enough to actually not be able to understand where the opportunities for improvement are some of it will be in selection some of it simply making sure you know where your stuff ups are it's feedback to management so this is how I want you to start your look at electronic ID whether you're a sheep or a beef this one again, sheep exercise because most of the work we've done has been in sheep but that doesn't really matter, you can use this for either the first thing I want you to do is to print off one of these at the top of the page I want you to write down what your breeding objective or enterprise objective is so if you're a prime lamb producer that might be I want to produce 150% lambs turning all lambs off at 21 kilos by 6 months of age at a stocking rate of 14 DSEs and I want to do it by January 2022 that's an objective an objective isn't I want to mark more lambs or I want to cut more wool or I want my calves to grow faster if it's a beef operation I might be it might be that I want 95% conception with calves turned off at a particular weight by a particular date and that's what your objective is you start with that then down the left hand side you start to actually formulate what do I need to record it might help me actually achieve that objective think about whether you're already recording or not and then start to note down in that third column what equipment you would actually need work out a cost and then also think about whether a contractor could do it because you don't have to do all of this yourself now sometimes we've done these we've sat down with someone we work through that whole process and realized EID has nothing that it can contribute for great outcome that's fantastic if that's what it does but for others it's complex for others we sit down we work out actually they need a lot of equipment to do what they want to do and then for some it's quite simple we only need to record a couple of things EID does make it easier and more accurate and so it has a role to play within their business you can't improve what you don't measure it's pretty simple if you want to make improvements for a particular trait or particular area of your business you must be measuring it so that you can understand the current level level of performance and track your progress but understanding the information is absolutely critical this is my sector this is the most important equipment the best equipment we are thinking hello this is the german coast guard we are thinking we are thinking what are you thinking about the collection of data is a complete waste of time and money unless you can actually use it we've seen over the years so much information collected in spreadsheets people have come up to me at different presentations and said oh I should see all the data I've got this and I've got that and it's in this spreadsheet and I say to them what are you going to do with it but it's going to be good having data sitting in a spreadsheet you can't use or you don't know how to use is absolutely useless we can do a lot with Excel with Microsoft Excel and spreadsheets you can do a hell of a lot but it becomes more complex with the more data you collect and therefore you've got to start thinking about what your data management options are going to be so there is a whole bunch of options out there more than just what we've got here I would recommend you have a look at data management options and even think about whether you want to manage your own data for a lot of our clients we don't do the data management so we're not trying to get their business I simply say to them you can't be everything so if you want to be able to use EID and get some information back out of it maybe you're better off to pay a data manager who you ring up and you say I need to know all of the orange tag use who have done this this and this or I want all of the cows who have weaned this much above this many kilos in calf weight over the last two years and someone sends it back to you then you go out into the paddock and use it because the using bit is the most important part right after all this time and all this talking I'm finally going to talk to you about equipment we've had an explosion of equipment in the last ten years and this is the best bit this is the single biggest change in EID is the availability of equipment that's actually user friendly so there's a whole range in price there's a whole range in capability across the top there you'll see a range of different stick readers and things now if you're doing some really basic recording you just need to record certain animals at a point in time to know that they were there then the far left that little all flex blue stick is a great one fits in your pocket doesn't cost terribly much it's fantastic as you start moving across the top there to the right the Gallagher, the Allflex, the Shewell and into the TrueTest reader they've each got different models but ultimately they start to build a lot more features into each of those and capacity into them and obviously with that comes price everyone has their favourites for various reasons some like the way one handles over another others like the functionality if anyone wants to talk more about that I'm happy to have a chat about the various different ones and their features down on the bottom we've got a range of different readers so panel readers the far bottom left corner there is a Shewell Hoop reader it's designed for reading sheep as they run through the next one across is the Sapien Technology panel reader for use used for pedigree matchmaker and in the two on the bottom right the TrueTest panel reader they're the most commonly used panel readers for sheep and cattle you start talking about Wayne Technology the ability to be able to auto draft animals clearly that's been a big winner in the sheep industry is the ability to weigh animals quickly and draft based on data or live weight or a combination so we've got a range there the Pratley's Gallagher and the Tapari and then when you look at the indicators we've got the Gallagher and the TrueTest ones but there are other options available they're just some of the ones that we had as an example I just want to show you though how good an auto drafter can be so this example we set up basically all that happened was we put a coloured rattle on the animals so that we had some different groups so a range of different colours and then we recorded that against that animals tag and then we set the auto drafter up to draft them into their correct colours go smoothly we've got a range of things happening in this video we've got lambs that won't walk into the auto drafter and keep backing up and shying away from it we've also got if you watch carefully a couple of lambs who come back around and stand next to the auto drafter now for those of you that aren't aware a panel reader reads in both directions so if it's reading into the auto drafter it's also reading away from the auto drafter which means that these lambs have come around and stood right in the read range and the reader is actually reading their tags and not the tag of the lamb inside the auto drafter you need to make sure you can exclude lambs from that area because otherwise you can have that same problem I pinched from Nigel Caron very proud of his cattle set up up there in New South Wales near Wellington this is an impressive set up so it's got an auto force system where the gates open and close all the way up leading up to the crush and then clearly it's got auto drafting capacity as well as scales and everything else built into it so there is some amazing technology out there for being able to utilise EID these days clearly whenever we start talking about the ability to handle sheep sheep handlers come into the mix there's a big range out there you've only got to wander around one of the field days to see just how many there are my one message for you would be make sure it's actually going to fit in your yards make sure that you don't go and just buy one assuming you're going to crutch all your sheep through it and that'll help you pay for it even if you're very good at crutching in a single unit the problem is there's only one of you having three or four people dragging sheep over the board it does drag out the length of time it takes to get through the sheep even if you're quite quick yourself there's only one of you so just keep that in mind as well what's also pretty exciting is the new range of auto-dosing applicators I'll talk mainly about the one at the bottom there, the Tapari one but ultimately these things can link to your scales so that the weight of the animal is what's used to calculate the dose that's given to the animal so we're not overdosing or underdosing any animal it's a really brilliant piece of technology obviously not cheap but I think it's something we're going to see a lot more of and ultimately one thing I would suggest is you always, always think about do you need to own your own equipment how often are you actually going to use it do you want to manage your own data and that's a big one as I said that we talked to our clients about is there a contractor in your area is there someone that can actually do it for you and ultimately just start with the basics I'll just give you this example that I showed you earlier this is wool value per head this was all done without the owners of the sheep doing any of the work themselves so they had a contractor come in who recorded all of the fleece weight and micron information they had someone analyse the data and convert it into dollars per head they then decided they wanted to drop the bottom 10% out based on wool value and they got a contractor to come in with an auto drafter who got the file from the data manager and implemented that decision they didn't do anything themselves it was fully done by contractors and that just goes to show you don't actually need to be able to understand the technology to be able to use the technology so now just to finish off I just want to have a look at what's happening off farm because to me some of this is pretty exciting as well and you should know about it so both lamb and beef processing is going through a bit of a state of change as more and more technology comes into the chain these videos again are going to be lamb because that's where we've been doing most of our work but exactly the same technologies are coming into beef as well now hook tracking systems have been talked about for quite a while Victoria's been working on them for a number of years and it's been a bit frustratingly slow actually getting them up and working but a processing plant is going through an environment for running an electronic ID system basically lots of readers most readers struggle when we've got a lot of interference happening a lot of electrical noise electrical fields in the area there's a whole lot of heat and cold and it interferes with the way tags read so they're not simple things to implement but we're certainly getting very close in Victoria basically what a hook tracking system allows you to do is track an animal from farm right through the chain until they hit the chiller now there is some talk of even going right through the boning room as well with some of the cuts and being able to track that back to farm the beauty of that is it starts to allow us to actually collect information on individual animals and feed it back to the farm and these new systems will basically give you the opportunity to provide you feedback on hot-standard carcass weights for individual animals retain and trimming information if you've got a carcass if you've weighed a lamb on farm and it's 48 kilos and yet you get a 12 kilo carcass come back you want to know what happened was it that had arthritis in the front joint and they took it off at the shoulder those sorts of things you actually get that information on an individual animal there'll be other health information whether that's grassy dog bites anything like that and then when we start looking at the really exciting things it'll be actually that dressing percentage potentially they're going to be able to weigh the lamb for you as before it comes onto the chain then record its carcass weight and match that dressing percentage automatically for you and the ultimate one is DEXA of dual x-ray and that gives the ability to be able to measure lean meat yield with quite a degree of accuracy so this next video is going to show you what it actually looks like this is the process of a lamb going through and then the image that it produces the image shows you how it maps a carcass it designs where the best positions are for the saw cuts and things and the bit that we're excited about from a producer point of view is that same image or that same technology is what's used to estimate lean meat yield and ultimately at some point in the future that's what you will be paid for is lean meat yield not just carcass weight but as an industry in both sheep and beef is go just chasing lean meat yield without a focus on meat eating quality because they nearly end up with pork that's essentially what they did so there's a whole lot of work that's being done on a couple of different probes and cameras to be able to measure meat eating quality in the way of muscular fat and shear force so that's really important now I showed you what the x-ray unit does before and how it can map a carcass this next video provided by scott's technology shows us what the robotics on a kill floor are capable of doing this if this doesn't get you excited I'm not sure what will every cut you just saw in that video is directed by the millimetre to be the most efficient cut for that individual carcass absolutely amazing now this next video and we might not see this in a boning room in Australia but this is again from scott's technology shows you just what's possible with a robot when it knows where to drive based on an image being scanned by a dexie unit now I ask you again what excites you about the industry now while most of my examples have been about sheep the vast majority of those same technologies are all applicable to the beef industry as well whether that's the equipment we're using which is all absolutely exactly the same in the way of readers and things all the things that are happening in the processing sector it's all happening in sheep and beef I've shown you a whole range of equipment today and we've talked about a whole lot of different bits of information that you can actually record but it's not the tools that are going to make you more profitable and more productive ultimately it's you any amount of equipment and technology is not going to make you more profitable just putting an electronic tag in the year of an animal is not going to make you more money tags and equipment don't make you money good decisions do and that's ultimately what it comes down to you the decision maker if you take nothing else away from this presentation I just want you to remember if you're going to step into the world of electronic ID whether it's in sheep or cattle have a plan and keep it simple whenever I speak to an audience whenever I'm talking to our clients we always use this same saying whatever we do well today I don't particularly care how good you are at something I want to know how you're going to be better thanks very much