Welcome to the Livestock Identification & Traceability System for South Africa. A modern, digital platform enabling secure tagging, movement permits, farm-to-fork traceability, and animal health compliance.
Across South Africa, farmers have expressed deep frustration over long-standing livestock structures that deduct millions of rand from producers every year — often without clear mandate, transparent voting, or meaningful farmer representation.
Many producers believe they have been misled by systems that were never fully explained to them and which they never had the opportunity to approve. Farmers ask why deductions continue while they struggle, and who authorised these arrangements in the first place.
Organisations such as the RPO — once regarded as a central voice of the red-meat sector — are increasingly viewed by producers as too weak or too distant to assert real control or defend farmer interests in national discussions. Many farmers feel the RPO no longer provides the authoritative leadership the industry desperately needs.
LITS-SA emerges as a response to these concerns: a transparent, farmer-led platform built to return power, oversight, and accountability to the people who feed South Africa.
For too long, South African livestock producers have operated under structures they did not design, did not elect, and did not mandate.
LITS-SA is being built as a non-profit, community-governed platform where farmers themselves hold oversight — not distant boards, not unknown third parties, and not levy-driven interests.
Across the country, producers are raising real, legitimate questions about existing livestock traceability and levy systems:
These are not allegations. They are questions — questions that every farmer in South Africa has the right to ask in a constitutional democracy.
When financial flows, oversight structures, and decision-making processes take place without transparency or open accountability, it begins to mirror the very issues South Africans recognise from the era of state capture:
LITS-SA stands firmly against such dynamics. South Africa’s livestock sector deserves openness — not opacity. Participation — not exclusion. Representation — not administration by legal elites.
No producer should be compelled to pay into systems they did not choose. No farmer should be told decisions have been made on their behalf without consultation. And no traceability structure should exist without clear, public accountability.
The coming FMD outbreaks, export challenges, and food-security pressures make one thing clear: South Africa needs a LITS built in partnership with real farmers — not imposed on them.
Created in collaboration with grassroots producers, national livestock communities, and open farmer forums such as the South African Cattle Farmers Group , LITS-SA will be: