Sheep must have own tags, says EU (From Evesham Journal)

Sheep must have own tags, says EU

11:27am Thursday 7th January 2010

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NEW regulations have been introduced by the EU requiring the individual identification of sheep and goats.

The ultimate aim will be to have every sheep and goat with an electronic identification device (EID) locked on it within the next five years, with various stages of the legislation being phased in over the next three years.

Some batch movements will be allowed under the system but, according to Jake Freestone, farms manager at Overbury Farms, it’s not a step far enough.

“To that end, we have decided to go down the fully EID route for all our breeding sheep,” he said. “Every ewe and ram – they actually are already tagged – wil have to have two ear tags, one yellow with the EID and the other a colour of our choice, inserted before the animal is nine months old, or earlier if it leaves the farm.”

The first ewe lambs have already been tagged with the EID in the right ear and a blue management tag is the left ear. The tags were then scanned, breed details added, put into the handheld reader and then uploaded into the computer programme. “We will be able to use lots of this information when we’re sorting lambs for market, checking their growth rates and selecting which ewes to breed from and which to cull out,” Mr Freestone said. “The equipment has been quite expensive to buy and set up but it will pay for itself with far more accurate sheep records, providing detailed management information for shepherd Tod Phillips that can be easily carried around the farm.”

Tagging the whole flock and lambs will enable all the killing lambs to have their tags read at the abattoir which will then indicate which rams and ewes are providing the lambs with the best carcases and therefore where the breeding should be going.

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