By Joel van der Veen
July 5, 2010

DAVIDSON - A new cattle identification tag system, touted by industry and government reps as a critical and beneficial advance, has some local farmers feeling skeptical and doubtful of its supposed benefits.

The new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag system, required by law as of July 1, is promoted as a key step in helping the Canadian livestock industry stay competitive. Allowing animals to be more easily identified and traced to their source, it can also be used in an animal health or food safety emergency.

"A strong traceability system will help Canadian producers get the premium prices their top quality products deserve around the world," Gerry Ritz, the federal minister of agriculture, said in a statement. "With RFID technology, we'll be better able to trace an animal, which is not only important to human and animal welfare but also key to the sustainability of the Canadian livestock industry as a whole."

But some cattle farmers aren't sure the system's purported advantages are worth the effort and expense.

"It's something we have to do, it seems, to comply with mandatory regulation," said Elwood Palmer, who farms red angus cattle about six miles north-east of Davidson.

The new system - meant to gradually replace the bar-coded dangle tags previously used by cattle farmers and discontinued in 2006 - is more expensive and complex, he said.

"We've been bearing all the cost of the tags," he added, estimating the expense at roughly $3 per head.

Doug McIvor, who farms angus beef near Girvin, said the system had not lived up to its promise. As a former board member for the Saskatchewan Angus Association, he helped promote the new tags when they were first introduced several years ago.

The tags were supposed to provide extra benefits for farmers by making it easier to record and obtain information on cattle throughout all stages of its life, from the farm to the processing plant, said McIvor.

"We were trying to make it work for our advantage," he said. "It's just not working out the way we hoped it would."

The tags are required by law, and McIvor, a 23-year cattle farming veteran, said he's heard some "nasty" stories about farmers receiving hefty fines from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for losing or failing to obtain tags. The CCIA website says fines can range from $500 to $4,000.

"Rules are rules and there seems to be getting more and more of them all the time," he said. "We've yet to see the advantage of having these tags in dollars and cents."

Adding to the problem is the difficulty of physically keeping the tags on the animals. If the tags are lost or misplaced, the law requires farmers to replace them, an expensive and complicated process.

"They're not by any means as foolproof as the CFIA's saying they are," said McIvor.

Palmer was somewhat optimistic, however, that the new tags might open up other markets for beef, including those in Europe, taking some of the pressure off Canadian cattle producers.

"We've been relying on the American market too long," he said. "And when they decide to do something, they just do it."

Each tag contains a computer chip and an antenna, and functions without battery power. The tags are inscribed with an identification number allocated from the CCIA's national database and will provide information when scanned by a reading device.

In a press release, Darcy Eddleston, chair of the CCIA, acknowledged there would be a transition period as farmers adapted to the new system.

"Although this change may be an additional one-time process for some producers," Eddleston stated, "the ability to easily capture information from the RFID tags will help all producers in the long run."

The CCIA has directed farmers not to remove existing bar-coded tags from animals, but to simply add the new RFID tags alongside the old ones. The new tags will be cross-referenced with the old ones in order to retain existing data on each animal.

The leaderonline is a division of The Davidson Leader, Davidson, Saskatchewan, Canada.