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Recently, the US government’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) began a nationwide UHF RFID pilot project to track livestock on pastures, feedlots, and slaughterhouses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched the pilot program last month. The purpose of the APHIS pilot was to confirm the viability of UHF RFID while livestock is moving (including the viability of multiple tagged animals being read while a truck is being loaded or being observed by a veterinarian).If it works well, UHF technology will be used to replace low frequenciesRFIDAs well as visually read animal ear tags with ID numbers printed on them.
The USDA is responsible for purchasing UHF ear tags and distributing them to members of the livestock industry such as producers, slaughterhouses, and feedlots. Currently, the agency is purchasing UHF ear tags from two supply houses: HANA and Y-Tex. But the two companies have not commented on this.
Neil Hammerschmidt, program manager for APHIS’ animal disease traceability program, said that in the future they will also be purchasing from other RFID supply rooms. So far, Florida, Tennessee, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, and Oklahoma have started using UHF RFID ear tags. APHIS will be responsible for observing the 18-month pilot project and sharing the results of the pilot.
The purpose of APHIS is to test the durability of the tags in real livestock management and the reliability of tag reading, Hammerschmidt said. APHIS expects that at least 15 producers, some slaughterhouses and 150,000 cattle will participate in the tracking pilot project.
In 2009, the USDA first used UHF RFID tags for livestock tracking as part of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). In February 2010, USDA terminated this program and enabled the existing animal disease traceability framework. “The new framework is more flexible and allows for multi-stakeholder engagement to meet local needs,” explains Hammerschmidt. In 2012, the USDA introduced animal disease traceability regulations that require formalizing the boundaries of livestock movement. Therefore, USDA requires the use of passive RFID or ear tags printed with ID numbers to manage livestock.
For state animal health officials and cattle producers, they are most concerned about the read distance of UHF tags. Both users and technology providers expect these tags to have read distances well beyond that of LF tags.
For pilot participants, ensuring traceability at close proximity was another challenge. For example, veterinarians who need to use a handheld reader to read tags when animals are vaccinated, they need to ensure that the tags of the vaccinated animals are read and not the tags of other animals in the area.
Hammerschmidt said: “If you tagged 1,000 sheep, how do you find one of them? How accurate is the reader?” He also pointed out: “This pilot is an exploration of UHF technology in animal tracking. .”
The RFID animal ear tags provided by HANA have built-in UHF RFID inlays produced by themselves.In addition, HANA will provide a complete livestock tracking and management solution, AniTrace, which includes a cloud-based AniTrace software, gateReader(to read fast-moving animal tags) and a chute reader (for reading and writing animal tags). In addition, the company provides 1,128 Bluetooth RFID readers and an Android app, AniTrace. In this way, the user can receive the read information using the smartphone.
HANA has signed a $6 million contract with USDA. HANA said that if the full suite of AniTrace is eventually adopted, they will also provide a TSL reader. The company has sold UHF ear tags in other countries.
The company has been developing UHF RFID ear tags for several years and started a pilot project in Brazil in 2013. HANA has been interested in the animal traceability labeling industry since 2008. “At the time, the only option in the market was LF tags,” Choi said. “But it didn’t make sense to us. We knew UHF technology was better.” Therefore, the company used passive EPC Gen2 UHF tags in the Brazil project and in Korea . Applied in projects in New Zealand and Australia. With UHF technology, work efficiency is greatly improved.
Although HANA manufactures RFID readers themselves, in the US market, they choose to use TSL’s readers. After the TSL reader reads the tag data, it can be uploaded to the user’s mobile phone via Bluetooth. He added that in the APHIS project, the technology will be used in three areas.
In this pilot project, the state animal health office will manage the collected data on its own servers.
Each project participant will judge the efficiency of the system and how it will be used in the future and create a report to send to APHIS. Next, APHIS organizes the results and distributes them free of charge.
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