040101 Cattle-Tracing System Will Face Obstacles

Washington Post - Of all the new safety requirements federal regulators announced this week for the cattle industry, the most difficult and time-consuming to implement will be the national system for tracing and identifying individual cattle, according to the industry. Click here!

Of the 800,000 cattle-raising operations nationwide, 90% have fewer than 100 head of cattle. Many are simply rural homeowners with a couple of acres of who keep a few cows around to take care of the weeds - - cows that will someday be slaughtered and sent into the food supply.

"If all we had to deal with was ranches that had 1,000 cows or more, that's easy to deal with. But you're talking about people who have five cows or 10 cows," said John Nalivka, president of cattle-industry consulting firm Sterling Marketing of Vale, Ore. "There's the problem -- how to get all those people involved in the system."

These smallest cattle operations add up to 49% of all cattle slaughtered in the United States, Nalivka said. That means even the tiniest operators have to be included in any national identification program.

Such a system would catapult the tracking of animals from a low-tech, manual operation to one using high-tech gadgetry. The new system would use ear tags on cattle incorporating radio-frequency identification technology that could be automatically scanned and downloaded into a database every time an animal is transferred from one ranch or plant to another. Ear tags currently in use to track vaccinations cannot be read automatically and are not universal.

Many larger ranching and processing business already have taken steps to start identifying animals, if only to provide a clear picture of a cow's pedigree and quality. But implementing a more advanced national system, industry experts say, will take time, patience, persistence and a lot of money.

It is likely to cost about $100 million a year to run an animal identification system once it is established, industry officials say, and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars before that to get the program up and running. What is not settled is how much of that bill will be borne by the government and how much by ranchers, processors and other beef-industry businesses.

The Department of Agriculture and its Animal Plant Health Inspection Service have been working for three years on developing an animal trace-back system. The current version of the plan calls for national implementation for cattle by mid-2005. But there are many unresolved issues, and that 18-month goal may not be realistic.

"That's a very aggressive timetable, and that's on purpose," said R. Scott Stuart, president of the National Livestock Producers Association and a member of an 11-member steering committee for the U.S. Animal Identification Plan. "If we're going to get something in place that's going to be workable, we've got to keep everybody's feet to the fire and get it to work."

Doing so might involve overcoming resistance from the industry, which is worried not only about the costs, but also about government interference in private enterprise and its access to private business data. When Canada created its system for tracing animals, it also encountered stiff resistance from ranchers.

"Our proposal was very, very strenuously resisted," said Charlie Gracey, a consultant to the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency and one of the architects of that country's new cattle ID system. His response to disgruntled cattlemen, he said, was uniform: "We have lost the right to anonymity if we're food producers."

Gracey predicts the U.S. trace-back system will encounter less resistance because of industry worries about maintaining domestic and export markets now that a single case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), has been found here. But the challenges are still daunting.

The first thing that has to happen is every rancher, beef processor and related business must be given a number and entered into the national identification system. Then, every time a cow is moved from one of those operations, it would have to be tagged and recorded. For a family that has two cows and might take one calf to market each year, registering and tagging could be done at the market, but bigger ranchers would have to do their own tagging. Each radio-frequency ID ear tag will cost about $2, plus labor.

"If you're talking about 2,000 head of cattle, it adds up pretty quick," Stuart said.

For slaughterhouses and packing plants, the costs could be even greater, as some likely will have to redesign their plants to allow for identification and tracking without slowing down production.

"It's such a low-profit-margin business, you just cannot afford to slow down in any way," Stuart said. "That could have catastrophic effect."

So far the industry is supporting the creation of a national tracking system. But if some of the cost, privacy and logistical issues get contentious between government and industry, it could be years before an effective system is in place.

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