This report presents the main findings arising from a pilot study of Electronic Identification of sheep in Scotland.
The study was undertaken by the Scottish Government and co-ordinated by the Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society (SAOS) with specialist contributions from Pareto Consulting and Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland Research Institution (BioSS).
This study was commissioned to identify workable and affordable EID systems for Scotland under Commission Regulation 21/2004 which requires the electronic identification of sheep from January 2010. The BioSS Report is also published and a link is attached.
Between July 2008 and April 2009, 209 farms, 6 marts and 3 abattoirs were enrolled in the pilot and 36,000 sheep movements were recorded and logged to a central database as part of the pilot study,
An electronic read rate of over 96% was established as Part I of the pilot findings. Most of the reads were carried out by hand held readers and phase II of the pilot will concentrate on static fixed readers.
Other issues which were identified in phase I which will be looked at as part of phase II, are the use of a central database, tag retention issues, standards for data transfer protocols and the use of Critical Control points to ease the burden of reading and recording on industry.