Meat & Livestock Australia's (MLA) Market Information team has finished the final stage of its wide-ranging indicator review, which has included extensive consultation with producers, industry representatives and other stakeholders.
The aim of the review was to:
- ensure the current offering of indicators is accurate, relevant and reflective of current and future market trends by developing new, retiring old and improving existing indicators across sheep and cattle
- engage with industry to understand their needs for new or improved indicators to better reflect market environment
- make continual improvement to deliver greater value to levy payers by providing additional and tailored data to inform business decisions.
According to Ripley Atkinson, Senior Market Information Analyst at MLA, the implementation of these changes will be made in a step-by-step, staged approach over the coming months to allow users ample time to become familiar with these changes.
"This approach aims to deliver continual improvement over time to the industry," Mr Atkinson said.
"The review process includes the development of new indicators in areas which were identified as lacking publicly available market coverage, including the online marketplace.
"In 2023, online specific indicators for young cattle, lambs and mutton will be released."
Several new features have been added to the existing indicators on each dashboard to allow users a more tailored data experience, ensuring the information can be made specific to each user's needs.
This will allow information to support business decisions more readily.
The new features include:
- all indicators will be live – meaning after every sale is completed the indicator's price will be updated throughout the day, rather than once at the end of every day
- users will be able to select and filter for weight ranges within each indicator to ensure market performance can be cross referenced with users' current animal weights before selling decisions are made
- fat and muscle scores will now be filtered by the user themselves for both sheep and cattle if they choose to do so.
As part of the first stage of implementation, a new restocker yearling heifer indicator will be released on Friday 9 December.
This indicator will access its data from the current National Livestock Reporting Service (NLRS) database and aim to provide users valuable insights to female heifer prices destined to be future breeders.
This will be particularly important to understand rebuild and liquidation intentions from producers in different regions across the country.
