From Monday 7 September, herd owners in NI are able to identify newborn calves with electronic identification (EID) ear tags.

EID is being introduced on a voluntary basis, although a DAERA public consultation published in late 2025 did suggest it could become compulsory in 2027.

But in the period since that consultation was released, we have seen an increasing resistance towards policies that some perceive as being unpopular.

Perhaps the best example is the fact we have ended up in a situation where potentially £50m of public money has been made available for a Bovine Genetics Project, to include free genotyping of the NI breeding cattle herd.

Farmers have to register for the project and undertake training by May 2028, or risk a penalty to their Farm Sustainability Payment. But they don’t actually have to do the important part, which is insert a tissue tag into their cattle. The success of the whole project has been put at risk.

History tells us that good leadership sometimes involves making difficult decisions.

The bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) eradication programme continues to drag on partly because suitable rules weren’t in place from the start. Similarly, the time to deal TB in badgers was back in the early 2010s when disease rates were half what they are now.

In the case of EID, it is not the first time that NI has flirted with the idea. In 2008, an industry-led EID working group told farmers to start using EID tags in newborn calves and that only EID-tagged cattle would be accepted in abattoirs later that year. Within a few months, the whole initiative had fallen apart.

For those farmers who spent money on EID tagging their newborn calves in 2008, you could understand why they would be reluctant to get burned again.

The case for EID tagging is that it will improve animal traceability and the movement of cattle through marts and abattoirs. But it is hard to see how any of those benefits are realised when some cattle are EID tagged and some are not. DAERA and industry leaders need to step up and make a decision one way or the other.