At a recent Beef Improvement Federation meeting in Calgary, convention goers were met by security staff armed with wands who scanned electronic name tags identifying people and their business affiliations.
It was not a gimmick but a modern approach that tracks people and products for crowd and inventory control using electronic chips and readers linked to unique identification numbers.
Similarly, individual animal identification and tracking animal movement are two main sections of Canada’s livestock identification program.
After 10 years of operation at the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency, the technology is available to livestock producers who want to use the national database for more than food safety and animal identification, said Julie Stitt, former agency manager.
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Working with other identification programs such as purebred registries and brand inspection services, the agency database can identify animals within seconds and find their herds of origin and original owners if a disease outbreak occurs.
The real payback will be opening the system to value-added information that producers can use to capture more money for their products by adding validated records about specific health or feed programs, animal welfare protocols and traceback.
All of this information will be linked to the animal’s ear tag number.
“It’s industry that has come to us now in terms of all these value added requirements,” Stitt told the July 2 meeting.
“We will monitor that and hopefully be able to demonstrate to producers the actual benefit of collecting this. It is not going to work unless we can create benefit for every sector along the way.”
Colorado State University meat scientist Gary Smith said it’s essential to collect this information for branded programs.
About half the beef sold in the United States carries a label from partnerships or alliances such as Harris Farms, Certified Angus Beef, Laura’s Lean Beef and Maverick Natural Beef.
“We have had a revolution at the meat counter that causes us to think and react to what the consumer thinks and wants in our product,” he said.
“A true brand has to have traceability with source verification of when, where and how.”
Brands offer consumers a guarantee of quality and retailers like them because they encourage people to return to stores offering those labels. The brands tell a story about where the meat came from and offer a quality guarantee that can command more money to cover the costs of special handling.
U.S. Premium Beef, a producer-owned company that custom processes branded beef lines, does just that.
“On average the U.S. Premium National Beef program generated an additional $60 per head … and just because we can use source and age verification to go to Japan, there is a $26 premium per head,” Smith said.
For Bob Church, an Alberta geneticist and rancher, tracking animals is about information control and analysis starting with DNA, the most basic form of traceability.
One piece of useful information found in life’s building blocks is identifying healthy and genetically superior animals in the Canadian herd.
The place to start is among purebred animals that have registered pedigrees and DNA records on file. These animals could be tested for a variety of traits but someone beyond the primary breeder has to be willing to pay for that information.
A study at Colorado State University led by Mark Enns is monitoring disease resistance in feedlot cattle. After the first year of study it appeared there was disease resistance among some of the 1,550 steers involved in the test, although Enns admitted he did not have parentage records for this group.
That will be done in future studies that trace parentage through DNA samples to assess the heritability of disease resistance and tolerance. At this point, researchers estimate disease tolerance or resistance could be 18 percent heritable.
In the United States, respiratory disease is blamed for losses of more than $692 million for treatment of sick animals that lost weight, failed to grow well or died.
