Computerized animal tracking

By Linda Redeffer

Business Today

The roast beef on your Sunday table can be traced back to the birth of the animal it came from â€" its genetic makeup, its place of birth, and its medical history.

Information technology has taken food safety to the next level, according to Roger Eakins, regional livestock specialist for the University of Missouri Extension Service in Cape Girardeau County.

Cattle breeders can track their livestock through an electronic identification tag the animals wear in their ears like a pierced earring. Each calf is assigned a number which is engraved on the tag, and that number stays with them. Data is entered into the system about each animal throughout its life until it reaches the slaughterhouse. A wave of a wand over the tag can bring up on a computer the animal’s entire history.

“It can verify the age, where it comes from, it can keep track of data entered into the computer,” Eakins said. “It will show when it was taken off the farm, and we can get data on the carcass value.”

The idea behind the ID system is to monitor the animals’ health in case of a disease outbreak or a possible terroristic threat against American livestock.

“If there’s a disease outbreak we can trace with in 48 hours where it has been and then we can quarantine the affected animals,” Eakins said.

Although it is a national program, Eakins said Missouri does not mandate its use. Swine producers use other methods to keep track of their animals; the tracking program is used mostly by cattle breeders. Many local cattle farmers participate, he said, because it benefits them financially.

“It’s a value-added incentive,” he said. “Farmers can sell to a processing plant and get an extra $25 a head.”

In many cases they can also demand a higher price for the beef at the market based on participation in the tracking program.

Farmers who export their beef use the tracking program to comply with foreign requirements.

“Those that are sold to Japan have to be tracked by source and age,” Eakins said. “They have to be less than 20 months old, and they want to know where they came from.”

Tracking by source, he sad, means that the animal can be traced back to the ranch where it was born.

The tracking system also enables breeders to keep a record of how the animals progress in the feed lot, and track changes in their breeding program through genetic selection, allowing them to improve the genetic makeup of their product.

“It’s all fairly scientific actually,” Eakins said.

According to Mike John, director of beef marketing for MFA, Inc., tracking enables regulators to ensure that calves were not weaned too early and to verify their vaccinations.

On the MFA web-site, John was quoted saying, “One of the real inefficiencies that we were always seeing was that these calves weaned right off the cow, sent through marketing systems, that we had 30 percent treatments and four percent deaths. And ... with our data tacking system, we have less than two percent treat and a tenth percent death loss during the 45-day weaning period.”

For farmers who worry about the government invading the confidentiality of their records, the health tracking system is able to pinpoint only those animals that have been found to be at risk of disease, and not have to inspect every animal in a widespread area.

“It’s a value,” Eakins said. “More and more people want to know where their food comes from. Grocery stores want to know more and more where the food comes from, whether they are selling farm-fed cattle raised here in the heartland.”