V.DIG.2000 - Technical advisor for the disease and defect data pilot studies

Summary

Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) undertook the red meat pilot trials for the RR4P 'Health 4 Wealth project' and was funded through this initiative. The red meat pilot trials were to enhance the utilisation and sharing of disease and defect data for the benefit of the supply chain.

The purpose of this project was to provide technical support to the eight companies involved in the Health 4 Wealth red meat pilot trials. The technical advisor assisted companies and their software providers around implementing the draft disease and defect data standards. This included validating the draft data standards and identifying any gaps or changes required to finalise the standard for adoption.

Objectives

1. Provide technical support and advice to software vendors and processors around implementing the draft data standards for peri mortem information for the red meat trials. This will include identifying and recording gaps in the current draft data standards.
2. Provide technical support and advice to software vendors and processors around implementing the draft data standards from lairage to post-mortem inspection in plants outside of the H4W red meat pilot trials. The advisory role will involve ensuring the accuracy and consistent reporting of disease and defect data against the draft data standards.
3. Provide technical support to the software vendors and processors around making the required amendments to their software programs to capture and report disease and defect data.
4. Monitoring the disease and defect data collection and electronic reporting to ensure that the systems are achieving the objectives.
5. Review the disease and defect data collected by processing plant to identify any inconsistencies with their file upload compared to the draft data standards for peri-mortem information for red meat trials.
6. Review and validate the data captured and collected by the processors to identify any data issues or errors before this data is released to producers. ISC will identify which processing companies involved in the red meat pilot trials will require this.
7. Provide technical support and advice to the industry working group around finalising and managing the draft data standards for peri-mortem information.

Key findings

• Nine month pilot trials tested the capturing and collection of disease and defect data during processing and provided feedback to producers through either Livestock Data Link or alternative system chosen by the company.
• Provided technical advice to the eight companies and their relevant software vendors or IT departments in implementing the draft data standards for peri-mortem information reporting across the major red meat species.
• Additional functionalities were uncovered, including allowing disease and defect data aggregated at the mob-level for sheep processors and producers, and allowing plants to retain the use of local terminology by mapping it to the terms in the draft standard.
• Several key issues were identified in the course of the project, including a knowledge gap in system vendors understanding of meat inspection processes, missing data elements covered in the draft standard, such as inspector codes, and the need to communicate how updates to the standards needed to be implemented.
• The project uncovered that the language used to describe disease and defect conditions was not used uniformly across the Australian meat industries plants.

Benefits to industry

The project has delivered a key benefit in showing a need for disease and defect data, along with a standardised framework through which plants can collect and report on disease and defect data. The use of the disease and defect standards will enable better benchmarking across industry.

MLA action

The draft disease and defect standard updated and finalised based on the insights from this project and to the AMILSC for endorsement.

Future research

The individual sheep disease and defect standard needs to be further tested and validated within supply chains due to issue around implementing individual carcase hook tracking technology.