Nourishing calves with NAIT

2:06

Genna Harris - Southland farmer

We're a family operated bull farm. We rear 400 calves on our farmer and my husband's parents rear 800 calves. Our calves are four days old when we pick them up off dairy farmers.

So when we arrive at the dairy farm to pick our calves up, they are NAIT tagged, and then we scan them with the wand and as we're leaving, I bluetooth the tags from the scanner into my phone app and it goes straight through to NAIT.

Most of the times it's on the NAIT system before we leave the dairy farm. If not, it's definitely in the NAIT system before we arrive home.

You need to do it straight away, especially this time of season. You get so tired, seven days a week.

This is the first year that we've had the app and it's amazing and it's a peace of mind knowing that the calves are in the system before we get home because we do get tired. and we'll say we'll do it tomorrow and then you go pick up more calves, and it can get away from you.

Rearing bulls is our livelihood. So, traceability is very crucial to our operation. As we pick them up from our suppliers and they can be here for a few months and then we send them on to another supplier. So, if a disease did pop up, it's good to know that the animal can be traced and the animals can be isolated.

The size of the operation that we have, we can't afford to have a disease spread through our sheds and that's why NAIT is so important for the traceability.

I couldn't imagine losing a large amount of stock. The calves, it's my life.

If the calves leave here and we've done all we can at our end, it needs to be carried on at the other end. So that calf is always traceable.

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