New technology in tagging is potentially branching out in usages, allow farmers to do more than prevent diseases in their livestock.
The new range of cow tags, called Ceres Ranch are reusable and give monitoring activity alerts in real time have recently been launched.
While the tags are still yet to to be NLIS compatible, Ceres CEO David Smith said the tags use similar satellite technology that Apple use for their new iPhone 14 for emergency messaging, and can be used for more than disease prevention.
"The reason why we feel satellites are useful is because a large amount livestock throughout the world are in regional to very remote locations, and the establishment of infrastructure to be able to get the communications to a device that's on the animal is impractical to say the least," he said.
Mr Smith said the tags, developed in collaboration with CSIRO, could also switch countries and monitor live exports through to their destination to maintain animal welfare.
He also referred to an independent study into farm crime released in September by the University of New England (UNE) that used Ceres Ranch tags.
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It included a mock theft where data was monitored from 20 tagged sheep as they were moved from farms in Armidale to Tamworth, NSW.
"Twelve minutes after the arrival of the thieves, a formal 'high activity alert' was received from six of the 20 tags indicating the sheep were being 'agitated' - or moving much faster than normal - which suggests a problem," co-director of the UNE Centre for Rural Criminology, Dr Kyle Mulrooney said.
NSW Police tracked down the vehicle with the sheep within 25 minutes.
John Wyld, Harrow, who is on the Victorian Ministerial Advisory Committee on the implementation of cattle NLIS says tagging has come a long way for cattle since it's implementation.
He says current NLIS technology does much of what farmers need on farm and while it is still great to see advancements, costs .
"The tags that we've got will do all that work for on farm management, and I'm not aware of anything coming out of the horizon that will do a better job quite frankly," she said.
"Some people will claim that but when you dive into it... but there are a few other issues where not everybody needs to do what these tags do, and then for the cost becomes prohibitive."
Mr Smith however argued that the reusability of the Ceres Ranch tag would meant the cost per animal for a farmer comes down dramatically over the long term.
