Main Applications: Live Stock Identification
With increased concern about food safety and the spread of livestock diseases (BSE, FMD, and Scrapie), governments in many countries are mandating the identification of individual animals. The electronic tracking of animals using injectible glass tags, ear tags or boluses, greatly simplifies this process. On the farm, information can be logged for each animal from growth rates and feeding to health stats and breeding. On the road, more information can be stored regarding animal movements. The scheme is to ensure that meat, and its history, can be traced back to the individual animal.
Texas Instruments RFID tags are being used to identify millions of livestock animals around the world. These systems track meat and dairy animals, valuable breeding stock and laboratory animals involved in lengthy and expensive research projects. With the chips in an electronic ear tag or inserted into the reticulum of ruminant animals, farm management and data collection can be fully automated for such processes as feeding, weighing, disease control, subsidies, and breeding practices as well as quality and tracebility assurance.
Texas Instruments has been able to develop the Livestock ID technology successfully working closely together with industry leaders like:
CASE STUDY
Established to meet livestock identification and traceability requirements mandated by the European Union (EU) in 1999, NLIS is the largest and most sophisticated livestock database and management system in the world. NLIS livestock producers are required to positively identify cattle. To meet these requirements, they are using a rumen pellet or ear tag containing a low frequency (134.2 kHz) RFID transponder. These RFID devices feature read / write capabilities, allowing producers to add, change, or retrieve details relating to each animal, such as health information, farm location history, market eligibility, and commercial information, on the spot.
Warrnambool Livestock Exchange in Victoria, Australia is the first saleyard to implement the system, which reads multiple RFID tags simultaneously, including TI's ISO 11784/5 compliant low frequency transponders. As animals of varying size move through the saleyard weigh system, readers installed across a laneway, or at the entrance or exit to a weighbridge, identify and track their movements. Because RFID technology does not require line-of-sight, it takes only a millisecond to read a cattle's unique ID number, allowing animals to be identified quickly and accurately, without physical restraint. As many as 3,000 cattle can be recorded each day with the multi read system, compared to previous methods, which tracked a daily average of only a few hundred animals.
In addition to compliance with EU guidelines, other advantages of such a multi read system include more accurate tracking and data capture, faster processing time, decreased labor costs, and more efficient communication throughout the entire supply chain.