‘Beef Week’ goes digital at this year’s Ekka

Following a callout from the Beef Committee of the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (RNA), this year’s Beef Week saw many producers use the electronic National Vendor Declaration (eNVD) to send cattle to the show.

This shift to using digital consignments and away from paper forms was driven by Beef Committee Chair Gary Noller and supported by AAM Investment Group, one of the Ekka’s major sponsors.

James Thompson, AAM’s Research & Development Manager, worked closely with Integrity Systems Company (ISC) to develop materials to help producers use the eNVD web-based system or mobile app, even if they were unfamiliar with digital consignments.

Results

“We’ve had pretty positive feedback from many of the producers coming in with the eNVDs,” he said.

“I’ve even had people saying to me that they’ve never used the eNVD before, but now they’ve gone through the process they’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple and quick it is.”

The positive feedback translated into a positive outcome, with almost three quarters of the stud and led steer cattle coming through on eNVDs.

“All up, we had around 250 consignments for the 1,000-plus head in those categories and, of those consignments, we received around 180 eNVDs submitted,” James said.

“That’s a fantastic result and I think Gary and the rest of Ekka’s Beef Committee will be keen to build on this next year.”

Making it easy for organisers and competitors 

James said an NVD was required for all cattle coming onto the Ekka’s Property Identification Code (PIC), adding the steers were very closely tracked as they would be moving on to Nolans for processing as part of the carcase competitions.

“With everything automatically online, it’s made reconciling such a large number of Vendor Declarations a lot easier and quicker this year,” James said.

Boonah State High School teacher Aidan Richters said he'd used the eNVD to bring two led steers to the Ekka, as well as three stud cattle (two heifers and a bull) from Talgai Santa Gertrudis Stud.

“It’s the first year we’ve brought cattle for the Ekka’s Schools Competition and using the eNVD to consign them was easy, especially for the steers that will head to the processor after judging,” Aidan said.

“Having to submit the Health Declaration and the MSA paperwork for the processor is a lot simpler because the documents are all linked, so it’s just a matter of clicking a few buttons. If I did it by hand, I’d be copying numbers and other details over and it would be a lot more time consuming.”

The early eNVD adopter

Southeast Queensland producers, Brad and Sharon Stenzel of Warrill View, together with their daughters Katie and Emily, were at Ekka to compete in both the youth and open categories of this year’s Led Steers Competition.

Brad, who also runs a meat processing business, was an early adopter of the eNVD and he said using the eNVD to come to Beef Week was a seamless experience.

“Because of my businesses, I needed three separate eNVDs to bring my cattle to Ekka this year. However, it was still so quick because I can just copy the information across,” he said. “That means I’m done with each one in under a minute instead of the ten minutes it used to take to fill out the old paper form.”

While Brad’s been using the eNVD for a while, he hasn’t made the shift to the app and is happy using the web-based system, even when he’s on the move.

“The web-based system can do everything you need. It doesn’t matter where I am, I just bring up Windows Explorer, go to the bookmarked eNVD webpage and away I go.”

Having fully embraced digital consignments, Brad proudly acknowledged he no longer relies on paper NVD or MSA books – everything is done completely online.

“Going digital means I can be certain all my data is going to be easily available if I need it, and I can still easily print out the consignment for my transporter if I need to.”

Seeing the eNVD’s potential

Droughtmaster seedstock producers Jason and Carissa Childs of ‘Alkira’, near Dingo in Central Queensland, tried the eNVD for the first time when coming to Ekka.

Jason had been aware of the eNVD for some time but decided to try it when the request to use eNVDs came through from this year’s Ekka.

“I’d always put it (eNVDs) in the too hard basket previously, but I thought it was important to get on board and help the Beef Committee out when they asked,” he said. “It was definitely a learning curve, and I think it still needs some work, but I can definitely see the value in it now.”

“Being able to make changes to the consignment if something happens when you’re loading is really great, so say if one of the animals hurts itself it’s easy to just change the number as needed.”

Jason had originally been reluctant to switch over to the eNVD as he was concerned about his transporters not being set up to receive them. However, after discovering he could share the eNVD by SMS or email, that’s no longer a roadblock.

“I still think it’s important for more of the show societies and trucking companies to be set up to receive the eNVDs and I’d like to see more work done in engaging them so we can get that happening,” he said. “I think once everyone’s on there and using it, it’ll work well.”

Now he’s had the opportunity to use the app, Jason would like to see some additional functionality added in future updates of the eNVD.

“We had to fill out our tick biosecurity certificate to come into the Ekka and it would be great to have that available digitally,” he said. “This time round, we just took a photo of it and added it as an attachment, but it would be good if, similar to the Health Declaration, we could add it automatically.”