The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is planning to consolidate three existing systems for recording livestock movements in England into one.
Under its Livestock Information Programme (LIP) it is aiming to establish a new Livestock Information Service (LIS) in place of the individual systems for sheep, cattle and pigs.
Livestock Information Ltd, a subsidiary of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, is leading the work on behalf of Defra and has published a market notice for support in testing and deployment services.
It says that LIS will be deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud and use its DevOps capability for continuous development, deployment and testing.
The service will collect data on different species – taking in births, deaths and movements of animals – to support disease prevention and management through livestock tracing. It is also expected to provide for improvements in productivity and efficiency on farms.
Among the current priorities of the programme are the development of an automated deployment and testing capability and the testing of the interface, integration, operational acceptance and service model.
While the notice does not provide a clear timescale for the programme, it says it will be a phased approach with the existing systems being decommissioned at different times.
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