Evaluating the potential cost benefits of electronic data recording for UK sheep and beef farms

Electronic Identification Devices (EID) can improve animal welfare, detect disease outbreaks early, and optimise diets for increased production in farming businesses.

 Traceability is crucial for animal welfare and food safety. EID in sheep and cattle passports helps accurately record their movements, ensuring complete traceability. This enables quick identification of potential health risks or disease outbreaks to ensure safe consumption. It also helps the UK market its livestock products worldwide as high-quality and safe. Without traceability, the UK's ability to export products would be limited and farmers' profitability reduced.

It is challenging to assess the cost-benefit of using EID for farmers at the farm level. Although mandatory for sheep in the UK, only a small percentage of UK sheep and beef farmers use EID for individual animal or flock/herd-level data recording. Even when EID is used, most farms only collect data on their animals once or twice a year. Farmers worldwide agree that when EID became mandatory, it pushed them to use it to help them understand their livestock businesses. However, better integration of data between government gateways, livestock markets, slaughterhouses, and all the different on-farm software programmes used on farms is necessary to provide an easier way to generate useable reports for farmers to understand and compare their business year on year and against industry KPIs. In trials in Australia, they have seen a cost-benefit of using EID – for every $1 invested, they saw up to a $7 return on investment. In the UK, a trial by Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) has seen a £3 per ewe benefit by using the technology.

Farmers need independent support to understand and integrate software and hardware across different platforms, as well as training and ongoing support for accurate and easy operation of their equipment and software. Currently, in the UK government capital grants support the purchase of EID hardware but not software.

Farmers are purchasing equipment with limited support to help them get the most out of the equipment. The UK government, as well as software companies, need to support farmers with ongoing training to get the most out of their investment. There seems to be a global lack of farmer training, which is what most farmers are looking for, from people going on farms to help capture important and accurate data to simple training e.g. ‘How do I connect the equipment to a phone or computer to report a movement?’

To overcome integration and data management challenges and promote sustainable agriculture practices, it is essential to collaborate between farmers, industry stakeholders, and technology providers on how EID data can enhance farmers' abilities to manage their livestock effectively and efficiently. However, collaboration and knowledge-sharing among farmers, industry stakeholders, and technology providers are essential to realise these benefits fully.

EID offers lots of opportunities. The key to using it effectively is not making it too complicated and using the technology to the level which brings a benefit and return from beyond what is required for simple identification purposes.