"It has caused a few dramas," Moss Vale saleyards co-ordinator Andrew Murdoch said.

"The delays have caused a bit of a hiccup; there's still a few coming through without the tags.

"It's getting easier every week, but it's still a bit of a learning curve."

Mr Murdoch was hopeful the backlog of orders would be cleared by early October. He said the demand from big properties in Queensland, where graziers were ordering thousands of tags at a time, was having the greatest impact.

Under the NLIS, tags must be fitted to all livestock before they can leave a property, whether it's for sale or simply to be moved from one property to another.

But NSW Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald claims tag delivery times have been exaggerated.

Mr Macdonald said overall response to the NLIS - introduced on July 1 - had been phenomenal. The scheme makes it mandatory for all Australian livestock to be fitted with special machine-readable Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) to enable an animal to be traced from birth to slaughter.

With more than 6.5million tags on the NLIS database so far, Mr Macdonald said a range of claims about delivery times and emergency tag arrangements through the Rural Lands Protection Boards (RLPB) needed to be put in context.

"Cattle producers have known about the current NLIS arrangements for more than a year and have been encouraged at every turn to anticipate strong demand and place tag orders well in advance," he said.

However, according to Moss Vale RLPB ranger Charles Signorelli, while delays were envisaged with the introduction of the new system, nobody expected them to go on so long.

Mr Signorelli said demand for emergency devices at the weekly Moss Vale sales had been "absolutely enormous". He said this was driven largely because there were only two tag manufacturers - one company in Queensland, the other in Victoria - with whom cattle producers could place orders.

"In some weeks, up to 250 emergency devices have been issued," Mr Signorelli said.

He said some people had waited up to three months for tags to be delivered, prompting the Moss Vale RLPB to devise a "very amiable" cost structure for producers who had placed orders three weeks before the date of sale to access emergency tags for $4 each. This compared to $3.80 charged per tag by the manufacturers.