Question reference: S6W-02497
- Asked by: Donald Cameron, MSP for Highlands and Islands, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 25 August 2021 Registered interest
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Current status: Answered by Mairi Gougeon on 10 September 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government for what reason livestock farms are being asked to move from the Cattle Tracing System to ScotMoves+.
Answer
The Cattle Tracing System (CTS) which currently records all GB cattle births, deaths and movements is being replaced. CTS was introduced in 1998 and has served the industry exceptionally well, however due to its age it is now a legacy IT system.
The ScotEID system, originally developed to implement sheep Electronic Identification (EID), is modern, flexible and able to support the introduction of bovine EID and electronic data transfer (EDT).
ScotMoves+ is an extension of ScotMoves, which was introduced in 2017 and is already used by around 50% of Scottish keepers to record within-business cattle movements (previously CTS linked holdings). ScotEID has been used since 2013 to implement Scotland’s Bovine Viral Diarrhoea (BVD) eradication programme, it has also been used to implement the Beef Efficiency Scheme and the Scotch Beef Potential Eligibility Checker (SPECC) and is therefore familiar to a high proportion of Scottish cattle keepers.