Machine keeps tabs on sheep in first for Europe

With so many sheep going through the Great Yorkshire Show, keeping track of them all can prove difficult.

So much so that the organisers had to draft in a piece of machinery which had previously not been used anywhere on the European market.

The Autodrafter is used for large sheep operations in Australia and New Zealand.

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A Yorkshire company, Agriflex, managed to import one of them in order to keep track of all of the animals coming in and out of sheep shearing event.

David Allamby and Jim Turvill now hope to make the equipment available in the UK.

The demand in both New Zealand and Australia has outstripped production which is the main reason it has not appeared here until now.

It is primarily aimed at large sheep operations and markets and abattoirs due to the range of applications incorporated in one machine.

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As well as being able to read EID tags, used on all UK sheep, it can also store health information and details about weight gains. All information is stored on a removable card, like a digital camera memory card.

Slaughter information can be taken from emails to complete an animal’s record.

Mr Allamby said: “A lot of markets have not introduced anything other than handheld stickreaders for that reason. Which are not really up to the job as a complete recording system for large amounts of through-put.”

Mr Turvill was at all three days of the show, talking to farmers about the equipment and extolling is virtues.

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Electronic identification of sheep became compulsory at the end of 2009 in Britain in order for the country to comply with European Union-wide legislation.

Controversial at the time, it is designed to ensure more accurate tracing of animals in the event of another catastrophic animal disease outbreak such as foot and mouth.

Following a recent review on red tape in farming by the coalition Government, it was decided that it would be investigated to see if the cumbersome bureaucracy around the system could be simplified.

The Government’s Farming Minister, Jim Paice, has also said he will ask the EU to try and implement measures to further ease the regulatory burden that surrounds EID on the nation’s sheep farmers.