Compliance: guaranteeing success

Catherine Marriott doesn’t beat around the bush when discussing the importance of protecting Australia’s red meat industry.   

As CEO of Riverine Plains Inc – a group dedicated to improving the productivity of broadacre farming in north-east Victoria and southern NSW – she’s heavily invested in the success of her 600 members, many of them red meat producers.  

“The red meat industry is one of the biggest GDP earners in Australia – turning over $31 billion annually. It employs more than 400,000 people and includes 80,000 businesses. It's paramount we protect it, and integrity systems are crucial in doing just that,” she said. 

Integrity Systems Company manages and delivers Australia’s primary red meat on-farm assurances and traceability systems: 

• National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) 
• Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) 
• National Vendor Declarations (NVDs), as a part of the LPA program. 

Catherine says the importance of these systems cannot be understated.  

“If there's ever a biosecurity outbreak, a food safety issue or a problem with animal welfare, we can trace right back to the origins of where that actually occurred and stop it in its tracks rather than having things go through our industry and destroying it.”  

Australian innovation key to success 

Historically, Australia has led the way when it comes to integrity systems, as the first country in the world to introduce the NLIS in the late 1990s.  

“That’s enabled us to grow and improve processes and efficiency and make it easy for producers to use. In doing that, we’ve been able to keep markets open by proving we're clean, have good animal welfare standards and our biosecurity is safe and secure,” Catherine said. 

Ongoing innovation by the local industry on new ways to improve protections over time has benefited producers and overseas markets – and Catherine’s a big fan of ISC’s decision to bring digitisation of these systems to the table, saying that technological advancements have made compliance much easier. 

“It's a massive step in the right direction to pull three major platforms into one system and put it online. I think it's going to improve accuracy and increase timeliness. There'll be producers that are really happy to jump on board.” 

“The eNVD app is a game changer for producers, especially with its offline capabilities. A lot of producers sit outside service zones, so to be able to collect data on your phone without service is an extraordinary efficiency dividend and I think it will make a lot of producers happy.”  

Demand from international markets on integrity

With considerable experience in international red meat markets, Catherine says there’s high demand by overseas customers for proof that Australian red meat is disease-free, complies with expected animal welfare practices and our biosecurity is traceable. The 80 countries where Australia exports its red meat expect nothing less, including developing countries.     

“The reality of this is that they absolutely do care. It's really important to our markets and governments, that these countries are protecting their people by providing healthy food and that they're keeping the biosecurity of their country safe,” she said.  

With recent foot and mouth disease (FMD) and lumpy skin disease (LSD) scares in neighbouring Indonesia, producers and the wider local industry are comforted by the systems in place.  

“Our systems enable us to stand by the story that we tell and stand by the products we sell. Producers can hang their hats on it because not only are we saying that we're a safe country to deal with, but we're actually proving it. And that's held in the data.” 

100% compliance guarantees success

Catherine likes to say that any system is only as good as the input data – without 100% compliance with integrity systems by producers, the system will fail.   

“If producers aren’t compliant, it puts at risk not only their own business but the entire red meat sector. It's paramount that they are compliant, that they're entering the data accurately and in a timely fashion,” she said.  

Compliance doesn’t mean more work for producers – it’s as simple as documenting the data they’re already collecting as part of their business – and Catherine says the future is bright for the Australian industry due to widespread uptake of these systems.    

“I've worked in other countries, but I've never seen anything as profound and impactful as the integrity systems we have in our red meat sector. We're largely an export nation, so it's important that we continue to maintain and increase the rigour of these systems.”