Lifetime animal traceability starts with calving

Hi. My name's Paul Mercer. I'm a dairy farm manager here at Givaghi Gold. I'm the PICA delegate on this farm. We milk 400 cows and we've just started welcoming a few calves on-farm in the last couple of weeks. We're expecting 400 calves this year.  

It is important for us and NAIT to have lifetime traceability. I register my calves in NAIT through using the MINDA live app on my cellphone.  

Once I've done that I get the confirmation email from NAIT to say that it's been recorded. After tagging, I go into my MINDA app and record it [Close-up of process on his cellphone]. Going into the calving, record calving, put in the date, we're looking up the number of the cow (number 86), she had a heifer. The calf will be reared as heifer reared number 16. It's dairy. It's at our NAIT location. The cow had no assistance. And we're finished. 
 
One thing to remember with NAIT, is that by default all calves born on the dairy farm are recorded as dairy. When you're going to sell them or rear them on for beef, you need to change them to a beef production type in NAIT. 

Lifetime traceability is important to me, because if there's an outbreak you can trace it back, you can find out where it started, you can prevent it, you can find out what the cause was so it doesn't happen again and affect our businesses.   

Recording all your animals in NAIT gives us the ability to trace all our animals back to the source and helps with our biosecurity for New Zealand.