About Livestock Identification

Livestock identification and traceback are essential to:

provide the level of food safety assurance required by our customers and consumers
help protect the livestock industry from the damage caused by emergency animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathies (BSE) or mad cow disease as it's commonly known

Australia's livestock identification system is based on:

registering each property that produces livestock by a Property Identification Code (PIC)
identifying livestock with permanent identification tags (see cattle, sheep and goats) or in the case of pigs by tattoos that link them to a PIC.
recording the movements of livestock in the case of cattle, sheep and goats notifying the central NLIS database. Pigs notify Pig pass.

The aim of our livestock identification systems is to be able to effectively manage any incident involving an outbreak of a disease or contamination with a chemical residue.

This means that we must be able to quickly trace where animals have come from and where they may have moved to. This is particularly important in a number of areas:

Protecting consumers by helping to provide food safety assurances.
Export markets are often dependent on Australia being able to demonstrate that we have systems in place to effectively trace animals that have been involved in a residue incident so that they can be excluded from the food chain until they no longer pose a risk.
Australia's relative disease-free status for livestock allows freer access for the export of our livestock products compared to many of our competitors. We need to be able to quickly resolve any emergency animal disease incursion, such as FMD, if we are to continue to have ready access for our export products. Effective livestock identification and tracing systems is critical to achieving this.

Find out what you need to do when buying or selling cattle, sheep or goats, or pigs.

You can use the information and links below to find out what you need to do when buying or selling livestock, or you can use the commonly requested links on the right of the page if one will answer your query.

Selling Livestock

To sell livestock you need:

a property identification code (PIC) for the property from which the animals are leaving
the stock to be correctly NLIS-identified (see requirements for cattle, sheep and goats, and pigs)
Vendor Declaration information

Buying Livestock

When buying livestock you will need to:

tell the vendor or saleyard the property identification code (PIC) of the property to where the animals are going
keep records (vendor declarations and other records)
notify the NLIS database for private sales and purchases of cattle, sheep, pigs and goats.

Additional Requirements for EU Cattle

The EU Cattle Accreditation System is now administered by the Australian Government Department of Agriculture. For up-to-date information on requirements go to the Australian Department of Agriculture website.