Mr. Ray Doyle:

The issue of cross-compliance and how the bovine EID sits into this was raised. Mistakes are made on the animal identification and movement system, AIMS, database because animals are recorded incorrectly and amendments have to take place through the database. This has triggered cross-compliance inspection for some farmers when animals are not in herd because of these mistakes with the current manual reading system. From a farmer’s point of view, if bovine EID was introduced and there was a cross-compliance inspection which found a mistake, who is at fault?

The marts and factories, under EU legislation, can become critical control points for recording bovine EID. This leads into the cross-compliance and paper trail issue. The point was made that we need a bit of paper. It will always be there. A small average suckler farmer with ten animals can get a printout, the paper, from a mart or a factory with the full herd history of his animals. The mart can give him a physical printout, irrespective of whether it is bovine EID. The visual look of the animals under bovine EID will be no different than it is today. The paper trail can still be there for those who want it.

Like all Internet-based applications, this technology takes off at a pace out-thinking us all. There is a little plug-in device for one’s iPhone that will allow one scan a bovine EID without buying any hand-held expensive equipment. From the marts’ point of view, roughly €1,000 per intake shoot would gear up a mart to read EID correctly.

With this plug-in for the app for the iPhone, which I believe retails on eBay for about €300 and which will only come down, an individual small or large farmer could read them himself and get the full benefit of this now without investing significant amounts of money.

The issue of cross-compliance will always be there but it is greatly minimised as a result of bovine EID because tags either read or they do not. If a tag does not read and somebody does not put that tag into the database and an animal is missing from it, then there is still a cross-compliance issue. It will still ultimately be bounced down to the herd owner. The herd owner is supposed to ensure the records are correct but they will be correct if they are done through a critical control recording point such as the mar,t etc., because they will be updating the AIM system for us. They can still get a printout from the mart if they wish to have a paper trail.

On lost tags, if it is an extra euro for a tag, as the Chairman suggests - in other words there is no visual difference - and we do not use the bolus or the phial and they lose a tag, that is completely doable within the technology. For example, on these electronic tags their full title is, "What you see is what you get". There is an individual code embedded in the tag. If that tag is lost, a new tag can be issued which will have a different code but will be correlated to that animal through the AIM database. So it is possible to completely reorder a tag.

On the issue of the records, if someone wanted to use the available space on the tag to hold medicine records as well, there would be also a double saving in that because to encode the chip - this leads into the Chairman's question - with the medicine data requires not only a reader but also a writer. There will be a backup in the reader of what was written in the tag and there would, therefore, be an automatic backup of what is in the tag.

The issue of a security breach has been handled by the Scots through their research. The legislative data are completely encrypted and can only be read by the competent authority or a reader. It cannot be changed. On the issue of medicine records and antiemetic drugs, of course there could potentially be a bogus update of tagging information but that could happen in any event through the food chain information declarations that are merely signed where a farmer might decide not to declare it has got IVOMEC only last week and it should not have. That again is merely replacing the paper with an electronic version. That portion of the tag will be updatable by the farmer or by whoever buys it, but the legislative piece will not as it will be completely encrypted.

The smaller herds are taken care of. I may leave the star ratings of the boards until last. On the traceability and tracking of animals, the Scots did research on the use of UHF chip. A farmer can in real time via satellite pick out his cattle sitting on the side of a mountain in Connemara. In real time they can be tracked through GPs. That is again an extra cost. It is there to prevent rustling. The increased security value of this would be through a subcutaneous phial or a rumen bolus. Those are the only ones that could really prevent theft.

We have had a couple of examples of unintentional cross-Border co-operation on theft. A number of pedigree animals had the bolus ID but they had a tag number from the North. They were rustled down south and were unintentionally picked up by the vet through his hand-held device. Unintentionally he picked up a GB number as he was testing them even though they had Irish tags in. If we had cross-Border co-operation on EID, that would be greatly minimised because again we would have that throughout the island of Ireland with animals having IDs. That would be a bolus situation to really get tightness in that. There is an extra cost to that. What we have proposed here is the simple tags and putting the IDs in that.

I have touched on no paper with critical control points. Under EU legislation we are empowered to do that. Access to the AIM system was mentioned and we touched upon it in the beef crisis as well. At present, anybody can request a breakdown of the births and age profiles of animals across the island of Ireland. It could be looked at from a national point of view, a beef processor point of view or even a mart point of view. It would show that we had X number of animals in this age category and they may be coming on finished or be finished or whatever. We can take a guess at it.

Perhaps what the Chairman is hinting at, or what was insinuated, was that they could look into my individual herd profile and see whether Ray Doyle has ten cattle coming here to finish. From our perspective and that of the marts, and we are an animal identification and movement, AIM, interface user as well, we cannot do it. The meat factories are well able to defend themselves but I contend that they cannot see that level of detail but that is for them to defend. From an AIM interface user point of view, we cannot see that detail. Only the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has access to the number of animals I have and their full tag numbers.

In respect of the beef data and genomics scheme, this is an add-on. We have touched on using bovine EID as an enhancement to technology to make our lives easier and the national herd more traceable and user-friendly. The beef data and genomics scheme is another example of using technology and increases in genomics to increase the national herd and its growth potential. The original concept of the beef data and genomics programme was to reduce our carbon input by increasing the productivity of the national herd. We in the marts fully support the idea of the beef data and genomics programme. We are seeking grant aid from the Minister in this regard because if we do not get uniform and reasonably immediate implementation, whereby mart boards can take the data and display all the relevant extra data farmers need to fully adhere to the beef data and genomics scheme, we will dilute it and perhaps slow down the progress of the programme. We will meet the Minister next week in respect of a grant aid programme to speed up introduction because unless we have the same presentation of data on mart boards in Cahirciveen or Raphoe in Donegal in a fairly speedy manner, it will dilute and lessen the implementation of it. We would greatly value the assistance of the committee in lobbying the Minister to put a grant aid programme in place.

One of questions concerned cost. It will cost anywhere from €8,000 to €10,000 per ring to put up the screens to display this data. At the moment, the data are reasonably simple but this will only increase. That is the way life is anyway. When people buy animals now, the decision to buy is based almost as much on what is on the screen as on the look of the animal. This will only increase because more and more farmers will buy from a genetic profile, particularly in respect of dairy stock, rather than the look of the animal. Some dairy farmers are more concerned with whether the animal has an economic breeding index, EBI, in excess of €200 or €300 rather than whether the animal is throwing out a leg or all-white socks. This will only increase as the years go by. It is very important that the visual aspect is still there for the suckler herd. With the beef data and genomics programme, we have introduced an extra genetic or technological addition to purchasing criteria. Again, we need the marts to be upgraded very speedily to enhance that.