Livestock Information (LI) is planning to extend its service on the movement or sheep, goats and deer to take in cattle and pigs.
The company, which is owned by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), has published a market notice on a future opportunity to support the expansion of its platform, indicating that a contract could be worth up to £66 million.
LI provides information on the livestock to government and the industry to support the control of diseases, efforts to increase productivity and sustainability, and to develop a competitive trade advantage for Britain.
It is looking for a new service when the current contract, which is with a UK based provider with an offshore capability, expires in April of next year.
Sheep movements are recorded through the sheep application customer website and APIs to the systems of third parities such as markets and abattoirs. Data is provided and received from the Livestock Unique Identification Service ear tag management system and used by LI Ltd’s Data Barn analytics service.
Extra species
The notice says the scope of the new contract will be expanded to include information on other species such as cattle and pigs.
The supplier will be expected to build continuous integration continuous delivery pipelines using the organisation’s Azure Resource Manager.
It is expected that the contract will begin onshore but could be offshored or nearshored.
Earlier this year, the organisation outlined how it is looking at livestock traceability to support a sustainable farming system and the food supply chain – and said it is aiming to build a multispecies traceability platform.
“In essence, livestock traceability ensures that livestock production is accountable, transparent, and can be managed for the betterment of the environment, the economy, and society as a whole,” it said.
“Technology in the agriculture sector is a major component in the development of this work to build resilience by digitising and enhancing the accuracy of livestock movement records. Reporting livestock movements by paper forms can take up to 28 days to be received and processed, whereas a movement reported digitally results in the availability of close to real time movement data.”
