Approximately 3,000 Livestock Production Assurance (LPA) audits are conducted each year to ensure LPA-accredited producers are implementing the necessary systems to comply with the program’s rules and standards. These audits are a crucial means of underpinning the integrity of Australian red meat, ensuring our product is safe to eat, ethically produced and of a high quality.
If an LPA audit discovers that a producer's farm management practices do not comply with any of the LPA rules or standards, the producer may be issued with a corrective action request (CAR).
A CAR indicates that a non-conformance with the LPA rules or standards has been discovered within the producer’s on-farm systems, which has the potential to compromise food safety, biosecurity or animal welfare, or otherwise affect the integrity of the Australian red meat industry.
When a CAR has been issued following an LPA audit, producers are notified by the auditor and an alert is placed on their LPA account homepage. The producer will then be required to take action to correct the non-conformance within a specified time, as instructed by the auditor.
Further updates to the LPA system allow producers to upload evidence directly to their LPA account to demonstrate that sufficient action has been taken to fulfil the CAR. A step-by-step guide is available to assist producers to respond to a CAR online. Alternatively, producers can submit the evidence via email or post directly to AUS-MEAT.
The evidence provided will be reviewed and if satisfactory, will resolve the CAR. If sufficient action has not been taken, accreditation may be withdrawn from the associated LPA Account.
A typical example of a non-conformance that may be raised during an LPA audit is the failure to complete all livestock transfers between property identification codes (PICs) on the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS) database. To resolve this non-conformance, the producer will be required to ensure that any transfers of livestock onto their property that have not been recorded on the NLIS database are completed within the time period specified by the auditor. The producer will also need to ensure they submit evidence of this action to resolve the non-conformance (such as the transfer upload ID) to their LPA account or directly to their auditor.
Producers can view the previous history of all audits and CARs raised for each property identification code (PIC) since the inception of the program.