|
|
|
| |
| I.D.ology
News:: |
| |
| Bovine ID's |
Posted:
07-18-04 |
| |
I.D.ology treats cows as individuals, making small radio transmitters that attach to the animals to identify them electronically.
The nine-year-old Eau Claire company hopes to benefit from an industrywide movement to track livestock more closely to battle threats such as mad cow-cow disease.
“I’ve stuck with this an awful long time,” said President Robert Kleemeier. “I feel that this technology is very well suited to protecting the nation’s food supply. To me it’s important, in the long run, whether it benefits me or not, that there’s a greater good to come out of it.”
I.D.ology employs six at its offices at 1324 W. Clairemont Ave, where a wheelbarrow sits next to shelves stacked high with paper. Cow posters and maps decorate the walls.
Kleemeier, a self-described “city boy,” formerly managed a Cadott feed store and later an Eau Claire software company, Advanced Veterinary Systems.
I.D.ology makes cattle identification systems centered on a small chip that attaches to the animal to transmit radio signals that identify it. The general term for the technology is Radio Frequency Identification, RFID.
The RFID chips are clipped to the cow’s ear, implanted in its leg or fed to it in a bolus that remains in its stomach.
I.D.ology has a patent to make the leg implant, but the industry appears to be moving toward the ear tag, Kleemeier said. I.D.ology resells other companies’ ear tags, but is developing its own. The bolus is not yet on the market.
I.D.ology also makes readers that can quickly identify cows wearing the RFID tags. The readers take the form of a cane that is swiped at the animal’s tag, or two plates that are installed on either side of a corridor that the animals file through, he said.
The company also makes the software that lets the readers interface with computers and translating data, Kleemeier said.
When a cow has an RFID tag, each site the cow visits — every farm, truck and market — can easily be entered into a database.
That allows any diseased animal to be tracked, to find out where it has been and what other animals it was in contact with, Kleemeier said. That will be of immense help in an outbreak of mad cow disease and other communicable livestock disease, he said.
“Animals move more than people know,” he said. “In a lifetime of three years, they often move four or five times.”
The world has been hit by several livestock crises in recent years, including the mad cow outbreak in Britain, a hoof-and-mouth outbreak in Taiwan and an Avian influenza outbreak in British Columbia, he pointed out.
To make its products more attractive, I.D.ology offers supplemental databases that make farmers’ jobs easier by offering quick access to the cow’s medical, breeding and production history, Kleemeier said.
For instance, if a farmer must sort 10 cows to be bred from a herd of 200, he can find them quickly with a wave of a cane reader over their ears. After they’re bred, the cane can hook up to a computer and quickly update the data on those cows to show they’ve been bred.
Despite being located in the heart of the Dairy State, I.D.ology has few customers in Wisconsin, Kleemeier said. Most are in Canada, which has strict rules on cattle identification, and California, where farmers with large herds find the identification tags useful.
But as the United States is moving toward stricter cattle identification rules, I.D.ology hopes to benefit.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture selected the Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium as a prototype for a national system of livestock identification. I.D.ology is a member of the WLIC.
The USDA’s goal is to identify all livestock and record their movements over the course of their lives. It also seeks to trace all animals and farms potentially exposed to a foreign animal disease within 48 hours.
Robert Fourdraine, WLIC’s chief operating officer, said the group has received $2.75 million in federal money to implement the system in Wisconsin.
The WLIC has developed a premise system that assigns a number to all the places where livestock are kept — farms, markets and so on, Fourdraine said. The next step is individual animal identification, such as I.D.ology provides, which attaches each animal to the premises it visits, said Robert Fourdraine, chief operating officer with the WLIC.
The federal government plans to provide $33 million next year for individual animal identification and tracking next year, Fourdraine said.
“I think there will be prospects for a lot of companies like that,” Fourdraine said of I.D.ology.
The USDA hasn’t singled out a technology to be used in animal identification, but the feeling within the industry is that RFID technology is one of the preferred methods, said Todd Fleming, executive vice president of marketing and chief operating officer of Equity Cooperative Livestock Sales Association in Baraboo.
It offers the advantage of a quick electronic read of an animal’s number, he said. But RFID technology is in its infancy and has disadvantages too, he said.
The readers can’t read groups of animals unless the animals are run through readers in single file, and they don’t always catch every animal, Fleming said.
“The readers are not as good as they need to be in practical applications for businesses such as ours,” he said.
However, Kleemeier said I.D.ology’s Crossfire stationary reader is the best in the business because it rotates the magnetic field, catching tags that others miss, Kleemeier said.
Klein can be reached at 833-9204, (800) 236-7077 or michael.klein@ecpc.com. |
|
|
|
