A NEW era of sheep and lamb marketing had a smooth start at Victorian saleyards last week when the first lambs were scanned as part of the introduction of electronic ear tag scanning.
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All sheep and lambs born since January 1, 2017 were required to be scanned in saleyards across the state from March 31.
About 50,000 lambs had been scanned as part of the new process to Wednesday.
With the Easter Monday holiday it fell to the Central Victorian Livestock Exchange to lead the way.
The centre yarded about 22,500 lambs.
Manager Jonathon Crilly said more than 20,000 of the yarding were scanned for the first sale.
Mr Crilly said the lambs were hand scanned with the whole process taking about three hours.
The task was reasonably easy to achieve after scanning some 250,000 tags over the past six months in order to trial the NLIS database, he said.
Operating as the first store market since the requirement for Victorian saleyards to scan EID-eartags became mandatory, Kevin Thompson of Elders said the task at Wycheproof this Friday would be completed by staff-held hand wands in make-shift temporary facilities before more permanent arrangements were installed.
Mr Thompson said about eight or 10 lots in its advertised 5500-head yarding would require scanning.
He said the remainder of the yarding were either sheep born before 2017 or were stock purchased from interstate locations covered by mob-based movement declarations.
There was a yarding of about 7750 lambs at Horsham.
Saleyard manager Paul Christopher said until the scanners were installed in two to three weeks, Scanclear would hand scan the lambs in the selling pens.
He said agents were entering the information on tablets.
