The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Bord Bia are set to enter a data sharing agreement relating to information on farms that are sending young calves to slaughter.
The draft agreement says that its purpose is to facilitate a new use of data based on existing data sharing between the department to Bord Bia to identify farms where a large number of young calves are being slaughtered.
The intention is to identify farms where this is occurring in order to make improvements to calf management, the agreement says.
The draft agreement is currently in a public consultation phase. Submissions to the consultation can be made up to October 9.
Bord Bia has introduced new criteria in its quality assurance (QA) schemes to address the issue of increased young calf slaughter.
These criteria apply to QA schemes where calf slaughter may be an issue such, as the Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme (SDAS) and the Sustainable Beef and Lamb Assurance Scheme (SBLAS).
The agreement will see Animal Identification and Movement (AIM) system data, which is already shared between the department and Bord Bia, used by the latter for the new purpose of conducting an analysis of the data to identify farms where a high number of young calves have been slaughtered in a given period.
Where a particular threshold has been met, a note will be put on the scheme member’s record for this issue to be investigated at the member’s next QA scheme audit.
The draft data sharing agreement states: “Though not illegal, it is considered bad practice in the industry to slaughter a large number of young calves. The purpose of the new criteria in the QA scheme audit is to address this bad practice.”
A number of stakeholder groups were already consulted on this issue, who, according to the draft agreement, agreed that this is an issue that needs to be addressed in order to avoid “a negative implication” on the wider industry.
The new criteria requires that QA scheme members who are found to engage in this bad practice will receive a non-conformance finding in their audit, which could lead to their membership of the scheme being withdrawn.
The agreement says that there are safeguards in place to provide farmers with an opportunity to address the non-conformance issues before their certification is revoked.
