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Minnesota moving along with Animal Identification System Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Agri News staff writer
ST. PAUL -- Minnesota continues to move ahead with the National Animal Identification System.
The priority is giving all livestock farms a premise identification number, said Dave Wiklund, NAIS project manager in Minnesota. There are almost 10,000 registered premises in the state, he said. The program is voluntary, so producers must opt-in.
All information collected in Minnesota is confidential and may only be used in the event of a disease outbreak at the discretion of the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, Wiklund said.
The goal of the national system is to be able to track an animal to its farm of origin within 48 hours in the event of a disease outbreak.
The Minnesota Board of Animal Health has been conducting and participating in pilot projects. A swine project finished earlier this year and a beef project with Central Livestock Association-Zumbrota is ongoing.
The board is starting to tag the state's 11 Johne's demonstration herds and the animals that are being tested for tuberculosis with radio frequency identification tags.
Tagging the animals with RFID tags eliminates human error because the tags are simply scanned using a handheld reading device.
In the swine project, the group lot identification number and the radio frequency identification number were combined, Wiklund said. Five percent of the animals were tagged in one group and 10 percent in another. The animals were tracked from farrowing barn to slaughter facility.
The goal was to tag animals within five days of birth, Wiklund said.
They wanted to be certain they had a subset of tagged animals in each group as the hogs were moved. The number of hogs in each group got smaller as the hogs grew larger.
Producers can use RFID tags to gain competitive advantages, he said. The hours needed to manage a facility can be reduced and better data generated by capturing it electronically.
Technology now available allows pork producers to take a hand-held computer into the barn and scan an RFID tag. Management information can be entered into the computer. There is less record keeping and efficiency improves. It's easier to locate a specific animal.
Wiklund said there are already 35,000 sows with RFID tags in Minnesota. The technology has been adopted because it yields results, he said.
Wiklund has toured barns to see the technology in action. Workers track everything from feed consumption to death loss to disease incidence. They indicate if there's a spike in animal temperature or if animals aren't eating well in a particular barn.
"It's really high-tech and it's amazing to see it used in what many of us would think É they're doing this in a barn," Wiklund said.
The units used in the barns cost about $300, he said, and are similar to hand-held computers used by the general public.
Wiklund will submit a report on the swine project to USDA and may try for additional grant money.
At the national level, the NAIS program is embroiled in a debate over who should be able to keep the data.
Nationwide, there are about 170,000 registered premises in a USDA database.
It's yet to be determined who will store the data and who will manage the numbering system. Each company will have a different number assigned to it.
The long-term plan is to have the national program operational by 2009, Wiklund said. At that time, all premises would be identified and all animal movements would be tracked.
On the Web:
http://www.bah.state.mn.us/index/nais/nais.htm |
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