Realising benefits from sheep eIDs

Summary

Through a community of practice create credible value propositions (what’s in it for me) and real life examples for mixed enterprise farmers in Victoria to embrace the use of sheep eIDs to improve livestock productivity and whole farm profitability.

Objectives

By December 2025, in Southern and Western Victoria:

1. Create a community of practice within the project consortium who are embracing the use of sheep eIDs to improve their whole farm profitability and resilience.

2. To have a core group of 9 lead producer plus an addition 26 producers (so 35 in total) mixed farmers having tested technologies and applications linked to eIDs and capturing these experiences.

3. To have at least 50 additional producers with the knowledge, skills and confidence who intend to adopt technologies and applications linked to eID as a result of the 35 examples and associated communications.

4. To have shared the experiences of 20 community of practice members to the wider consortium membership of 1080 and beyond. At a minimum this will include 10 local on farm events (15 people/event) for the visits, 6 presentation/demonstrations at major field days (150 people/event) and other communications e.g. youtube, articles etc.

5. To quantify the impact on the use of the eID at the farm level and then extrapolate this to the that show a demonstrable improvement in livestock and business performance (critical KPIs - efficiency/labour unit, changes in per head or per ha production).

Progress

This five-year PDS is co-facilitated by Southern Farming Systems (SFS) and Birchip Cropping Group (BCG) and focuses on Victorian sheep producers utilizing eID technology to make better informed management decisions.  

The participating producers have reported a reduction in labour requirement, less stress on their flocks at handling, and improved record management by storing data electronically rather than in notebooks and physical folders that can get misplaced, weather damaged, or subject to human error. 

First round producers are reporting that they have been able to make better informed decisions when retaining or culling breeding ewes based on the lamb production data collected over two lambing seasons and are able to better identify repeating poor breeding ewes who previously were retained within the breeding flock.  

Second round producers are preliminarily reporting greater salability for their stud animals through the development of their own system of breeding values based on data collected by using eID technology. There have also been financial benefits seen through the combined use of eID and Bluetooth technology during drenching activities.  

For further information on these results, producer project information for both rounds can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/SheepEIDsCoP as they become available.