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New animal ID system being developed in South Dakota
PIERRE, S.D. (AP)--The South Dakota Animal Industry Board is developing a new animal identification system to track cattle.
Sam Holland, head of the board, said the system will help prepare the state for a mandatory national ID system, which he said is both inevitable and necessary to protect the nation's livestock industry from serious disease outbreaks.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced last week that more than $11 million in grants will go to South Dakota and 28 other state and tribal projects.
The board will use some of the money to coordinate a premise identification system, he said. Premise ID refers to identifying numbers for individual ranches, sale barns and feedlots.
The premise ID and certification system will be involved with Gov. Mike Rounds' Dakota Certified Beef market initiative, Holland said.
The system would focus initially on cattle, Holland said, adding that he hopes it eventually could expand to sheep and other livestock.
The system likely will use radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips attached to ear tags to identify individual animals, Holland said. The chips, which can be read by wands or other scanning devices, will contain an individual animal number. The ID number will link to computer database information about where the animal was born, where it was raised and its movements through auction barns, feedlots and even the packing plant.
Holland said the biggest initial benefit will be better prices for source-verified cattle and beef.
Wal-Mart and McDonald's restaurants want to buy meat from source-verified animals in order to maintain customer confidence in the event of an animal disease outbreak, he said.
The discovery last December of a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Washington state lent greater urgency to the national move toward a mandatory ID system.
Holland said such a system probably is at least five years away, but that timetable will be accelerated if another serious contagious animal disease shows up.
The system should be able to track where a sick animal has been, what medical treatment it has had and what other animals have been exposed.
Some ranch groups, including South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, worry that the mandatory ID will be expensive and cumbersome. They say their brand system already can track the previous location of sick animals.
Holland said the brand system has worked fine but that more than half the cattle going to slaughter don't have a brand. When that happens, the meat sold can't be tracked back to its origin, he said.
A good system will need ongoing funding from government and the industry, Holland said.
Date: 8/25/04
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