A six-month national animal identification and tracing (NAIT) trial started in Waikato last week, and if successful it could be introduced in 2010.
The trial, which involves 15 farms, several meat processors, saleyards and tag suppliers, is a working pilot study for a national project which aims to provide lifetime electronic traceability for all cattle and deer.
NAIT Governance Group chairman Ian Corney said that as long as the trial worked, wider implementation of the system could begin from later this year.
It was likely to become mandatory from 2010.
‘‘There is a lot of work to be done before that happens,'' Mr Corney said.
The system would provide information on the location of livestock along with their movement history, assisting with biosecurity and the management of disease outbreaks.
‘‘NAIT provides a platform for meeting the traceability regulations of exporters around the world,‘‘ Mr Corney said.
‘‘This is particularly important in markets such as the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, where retailers are responding to consumer and animal welfare concerns.''
The pilot will test the system under 10 different scenarios, and involves tagging animals on farm with radio frequency tags and tracking them as they move to various places such as sale yards, meat works or another farm.
Mr Corney said the trial should provide a final and full definition of how the system would work, produce documentation for each point on the supply chain, and an operational radio frequency tag register.
During the system's implementation, tag manufacturers would hold the information for two years until the NAIT database was operative, Mr Corney said.
That would hopefully be in 2009 or 2010.
The key was to ensure farmers did not have to insert two tags in the ears of cattle and deer - one for the Animal Health Board and the other for NAIT.
Eventually NAIT button-tags, which were smaller and less likely to fall out, would carry both sets of information.
Mr Corney said it had been a complicated getting to this stage in the trial, but the key was to get it right first time.