With the return of COVID-19 restrictions, MLA's National Livestock Reporting Service (NLRS) is seeking to maintain transparency and minimise disruption by adopting a targeted, flexible approach to deliver livestock market reporting – including the publishing of cattle and sheep indicators.
The NLRS is constantly reviewing physical attendance at each reported livestock market in accordance with government, industry, saleyard and MLA policy. This assessment, along with constraints around state border closures and associated quarantine obligations, is applied in determining whether an NLRS Livestock Market Officer (LMO) may attend a livestock market.
To minimise the impact to existing market reporting (including the livestock indicators), LMOs have been requested to apply their experience and strong understanding of their local districts in providing quality assessments of animals (fat and muscle scores, estimated weights, etc) for those sales where physical attendance is not feasible, but where data has been provided by an external party.
As always, this approach to NLRS market reporting is subject to change in response to the rapidly changing nature of COVID-19.
