Australian livestock producers need to cast aside stigma and actively report disease on their properties, according to Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA).

MLA has begun an $11.7 million project to improve Australia's livestock biosecurity.

The four-part project includes plans to create a national producer-based disease surveillance program, which project manager Johann Schroder said was fundamental to the project's success.

"Producers are often reluctant to report disease on their properties for a variety of reasons," he said.

"In some cases certain diseases create a certain amount of stigma in society.

"I've been in a situation where a farmer was acutely embarrassed when a certain parasite was diagnosed in his sheep, and he was too ashamed to show his face in the local town for months afterwards."

Mr Schroder said in other cases, there might be a situation in which the legal intervention, for a notifiable disease for example, could be quite punitive, which was a serious disincentive for people to report and help get on top of the disease quickly.

"So we don't have a well-functioning, farmer-based surveillance, reporting and biosecurity system already in place," he said.

Mr Schroder said it was too early to say if participation in the new system would be mandatory.

"Because of our federal system, any mandatory requirement would have to be fully endorsed by the states, and that has been very difficult to achieve in many cases thus far," he said.

"This system won't work unless we have got national participation from producers."

Industry fortunate to have avoided a lot of dangerous diseases

Led by the CSIRO, the project will also focus on studying vaccines against food and mouth disease virus, outbreak response scenarios, and using meteorological and sequencing-based tools to map potential disease spread.

"The Australian livestock industry is in a very fortunate position in that there are a whole lot of fairly damaging and dangerous diseases which we do not have, and we'd like to keep it that way," Mr Schroder said.

"In order to maintain that status, it is important that we are in a position to very quickly diagnose such diseases should there be an incursion, very quickly able to contain further spread of such disease, and that we are able to as quickly as possible eradicate those diseases.

"It's important that all three of those steps are achieved, because of the great importance of Australia's livestock red meat, specifically exports, to the national economy."

The four-year project will cover the cattle, sheep, goat and pig sectors, and has been partly funded by the Federal Government.