Residues in feeds will affect the marketability of meat and milk products. Australia’s export markets depend on all producers being vigilant about residues.

Before buying any feed material or feeding it to livestock:

• request a vendor declaration or Stock Food Supplier Declaration Form from the supplier of the feed;
  OR
• request a statement from the supplier of the feed that each feed ingredient is covered by a vendor declaration;
  OR
• seek a statement from the supplier of the feed as to the quality assurance system and/or pesticide monitoring practices adopted to ensure that the feed is fit for purpose and not contaminated with unacceptable contaminants;
  OR
• have the material tested for pesticide residues and other relevant contaminants (note: you will need to identify chemicals that may have been used on the crop or product in question).

When selling stock:

• National Vendor Declarations for sale stock must be completed fully and accurately.
• National Vendor Declarations for Sheep and Cattle include questions about the feeding of any pasture, crop, stubble, grain or fodder treated with an agricultural chemical in the 60 days prior to harvest or first grazing. Producers selling stock within 60 days of feeding materials with an unknown chemical treatment history should answer ‘don’t know’ to this question and identify the product fed.
• The National Vendor Declarations for Cattle also asks if by-product stockfeeds have been fed within the 60 days prior to sale. Producers who have fed materials not produced primarily for livestock consumption to stock in the 60 days prior to sale must answer ‘yes’ to this question. The by-products covered by this question include waste fruit, vegetable and fibre crops, which can be in the form of peel, pulp, pressings, stem and leaf material.

The feeds database can produce two types of reports:

• The first report locates all records that match the user's search criteria and displays them on the screen.
• The second report is a statistical summary (including the maximum, minimum, range, average and standard deviation) of each feed in the database.

Search instructions

If you are interested in seeing actual sets of data, or if you are only interested in specific feeds, you should use this interface.

1. Choose the criteria (common name, genus, species or cultivar/variety) that you want to base your query on.
2. Select the name of the feed you are interested in. Holding the Ctrl key down allows you to select multiple feeds.
3. Queries on some feeds (such as oats, wheat or maize) will return a large amount of data. Queries on multiple feeds are also likely to retrieve many records.
4. You can restrict the number of records returned by using the drop-down boxes to specify conditions (eg. to restrict feeds to silage feeds). Selecting the 'no restrictions' option on each list will not restrict the query, meaning all results will be displayed.
5. The radio buttons for the irrigated, weather damaged and fungus affected options can be used to further focus your query.
6. Click on the 'Continue' button to see the results.

At the bottom of the report, there will be a link to the statistical summary for each feed chosen. Note: this does not carry across all the search limitations, only the name of the feed selected.

Statistical summary

If you are interested in seeing the average, minimum, maximum, range or standard deviation of results for each feed, you should use this interface.

1. Select a criteria (common name, genus, species or cultivar/variety).
2. Select the name of the feed you are interested in. Note multiple selections are not available for summary reports.
3. Select a level of focus on 'seed', 'fodder' or 'other' if required.
4. Click on the 'Continue' button to see the results.

The summary statistics for the chosen feed are then presented. If you would like to focus the statistics, you can do so using the 'seed', 'fodder' and 'other' links. This has the same impact as choosing an option at step three above.