The braying of cattle and sheep mixes in with the mechanical sounds from the weighbridge, the clattering of fences and the hollering of stock workers who surprise a wayward steer who had gone exploring into a pen they shouldn't have.

It's been two years since the saleyards were centralised at the Powranna site and, despite throwing in a global pandemic that disrupted supply chains and market costs for the industry, TLX has been thriving - bringing saleyards into the 21^st century.

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A quiet revolution of digitisation has occurred over the past two years, hastened by the onset of the global pandemic, which left mainland buyers stranded and unable to make the trip to inspect livestock themselves or through their agents.

Real-time information at their fingertips, along with an increase in the volume of livestock coming through the centralised saleyards has ensured TLX has become an enticing option for buyers looking for good-quality Tasmanian livestock in volume.

Nutrien Ag Solutions general manager for Tasmania John Tuskin said digitisation was necessary, not just for traceability but for ensuring real-time information for buyers.

However, he said adoption of the new ways of working was the biggest challenge from an industry perspective, with agriculture often heavily reliant on traditional forms of communication such as paper trails.

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"Obviously we have a large demographic of agents and farmers, and some established ways of working that are very manual," he said.

"Being able to encourage them to actually utilise the technology and see the benefits out the other end has been a challenge."

TLX manager Andrew Palmer said the saleyards had only grown under his two-year tenure; and the new digital technologies have had a lot to do with that.

"It gives us a digital footprint and feedback from the time we take the livestock to the time it leaves this yard," he said.

"As soon as we take ownership over that livestock off the truck, we enter their details and can immediately allocate them to a pen and know exactly where they are."

Mr Palmer said the saleyards had also grown a physical footprint since he had started, with double the capacity of sheep pens built, along with holding pens for livestock.

Yesterday, 161 sheep wait in the holding pens; they have been purchased but will not get on a truck until Thursday morning - but they will be fed and watered by TLX.

And it's not only the pens that have received a technological upgrade - the saleyards also have a digital weighbridge, one of two weighbridges on the site.

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All animals that come through to the yards are processed via one of the two weighbridges, with their details added into the digital system.

It eliminates another paper trail, which was the old way of working, on coloured paper, that was used to trace and track all livestock.

Mr Tuskin said the decision to centralise sales at Powranna had been a positive experience, particularly for buyers, and that feedback was being seen in the increase of mainland buyers participating in sales.

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"They [buyers] are able to get real-time information through this digitisation process we've gone through. They have got knowledge of what's in the yard and what type of stock it is from sellers," he said.

About 40 per cent of sales from the yard are mainland buyers, which is a significant increase since before the TLX was created.

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