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Using RFID To Prevent Mad Cow Disease
prostoalex writes "Associated Press suggests that the United States might be on the move to create a centralized animal database that would track all sorts of information about the farm animals, including their origins. RFID technology comes into play, apparently, with cheap tags that could be assigned to animals right after birth and special scanners capable of retrieving the RFID and fetching the data from the centralized database."
They are working on a national ID program as seen here http://www.usaip.info/ it is nothing new. Its been in the works for years and we've been using a similar system (of which the national system will basted from) in North East Michigan to control and eradicate bovine tuberculosis. The USDA gave a 1.3 million dollar grant to start the program in N.E. Michigan in 2001 and we've been in full force since 2002. You think slashdotters are paranoid about RFID? Try RFIDing cattle..
special scanners capable of retrieving the RFID
Would they track it thorough your intestines?
"Pardon me sir, but you are currently digesting Mad Cow meat. Please stop!"
we're using RFID tags for something that can't complain about privacy.
Yawn.
A possible conversation overheard sometime in 2006:
Jim: Well Bob, since 2003 the mad cow epidemic has claimed 150,000 lives and forced the destruction of billions of dollars worth of cattle. In fact, there is no beef market in the united states any more and the global recession can be linked directly to that.
Bob: Yes, Jim, what a terrible waste.
Jim: But I have some good news. Thanks to the multi-billion dollar animal RFID program started in early 2004, we can now identify the cow that began the whole horrible chain of events. In fact I can even pull up her picture here on my smartphone.
Bob: Wow, her picture and everything? Cool! Too bad this technology didn't help us prevent the disaster.
Jim: Yup. But my stock in RFIDCorp is WAY the fuck up!
Next step: tag babies as they are born. Now the CDC can track diseases. Its for your health after all.
Who takes the brunt of every bad event in farming? The family man.
Agri business is a giant monopoly who has fought for many years trying to keep feeding dead cows to save a few pennies a pound-now they are saying that "oh, $25 a cow for RIFD will save the world from (the disease they caused) these rogue ranchers." the lobbiests cry. It's all PC these days.
I was in Ft. Collins one time. I was picking up a load of cattle. The cows were so gigantic I thought I'd woken up in a dream. A regular steer was so massive the poor thing couldn't even walk with out struggling. At least 500 lbs larger than normal. It was of course not a good family ranch, it was in a giant corporation feedlot. These criminals should be put to jail-and one day they will be.
It can lay dormant for up to 30 years before MCD affects a human. If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow. I've seen videos of victims. Sad indeed. 95% of all beef exports have been halted. Beef prices will plummet to 50 cents a lb. MMm. We'll be consuming beef like mad men.
When you can just conveniently blame Canada?
-psy
Yes, RFID is the key to this technology. Now that we have RFID, we can track cows. Prior to RFID it was virtually impossible to have a database of cows. But now, with the invention of RFID, tracking cows is trivial.
Stop feeding cows other cows. I have a feeling they'll be willing to go vegetarian.
Someone in africa ate monkey brains and got infected. All bad shit comes from africa, aids, ebola, mad cow, that flesh eating bacteria...
...is chipping your teeth on small ceramic chips while enjoying a steak.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Really? Can you elaborate?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Only diseased animals and high-risk tissues are restricted.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who requested the GAO report, isn't satisfied with the response by the FDA or the Agriculture Department, which monitors safety of meat and animal health. Durbin plans to introduce a bill in January to further restrict the use of diseased meat or high-risk tissues in animal feed.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
in billion dollar agri corp controlled farms and ranches, who are doing everything they can to control all land and farms-and water.
Yeah, big agribusinesses are bad. They cause family farmers to lose their businesses, produce artificially enhanced products, change everybody's way of life, and sometimes make products that are bad for you?
So what? That's true of plenty of other businesses, too.
I see no reason to get particularly worked up about the loss of a bucolic way of life for family farmers when most of the rest of the population has been living with such changes since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Get used to it.
If you want to do something about it, work towards social reforms and policies that protect everybody, not the minority of the population that happens to be in electorially important, thinly settled agricultural states. Even better, exercise your choice as a buyer of products.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, their is a chance within 30 years you'll be acting like, yes-a mad cow.
If you ate at McDonalds yesterday, you have already acted like a mad cow.
And what are you complaining about anyway? If you eat at McDonalds, you have already made your choice to support an industrial food infrastructure: industrial cooking of products derived from industrial farms. If you wanted to support family farms, you would cook for yourself or eat at businesses that buy from family farms. There are plenty of organic restaurants, after all. But, oh no, those are probably far too Birkenstock for you--all the wrong people go there, right?
And keep things in perspective: your chances of actually catching mad cow disease from eating meat are virtually nil; they are miniscule even for infected animals.
Well, I think in Holland we have this great system of tagging all cows using earmarks...
It was in place a few years before our mad cow scares started. Not that it helped.
However cows over here are identified unique due to this system.
So yes, RFIDing cows might help the US but it's not only about tagging! The administration system behind it is MUCH MUCH more important than the RFID tag... RFID is just for identifying the cow but knowing what it has been fed and where it came from and what it is produced in is more important. You do not solve that with RFID (or any ID).
M
stop feeding cows at all... problem solves itself.
How is this different from those tags your vet can put in yout cat or dog? It's just extending it a little bit.
I hope that bar-coding can be used as an alternative to RFID for the small farmer, so that e.g. grass-fed operations can stay in business without having their costs driven up by the less-safe factory farms.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
1) It's already against the rules for beef products to contain nervous system tissue.
1 7_beefsaf ety25.html
2) 2002 Agriculture Department survey found central nervous system tissue in beef products at 74 percent of the plants tested. Source:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/1540
There you have it. We already have regulations in place that would be perfectly adequate prevent the transmission of mad cow to disease to humans--and the regulations are not being followed.
What earthly good will it do to accumulate yet more tracking records and database entries? What's needed is a willingness to put public safety above the profits of private interests. If that's absent, all the RFID tags in the world aren't going to help.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Our solution? Go back to an earlier Slashdot article. Although there are proximity issues as well, this optical tracking system is what we will be using. No adulteration to the product, and we will be able to use this information to track cattle as they go through the process (albeit the head is removed at slaughter, but there is tracking through other means for the carcass).
--Chag
LIST
I live and work in an agriculture area. Beef production is the number 1 economic activity in my county.
I have been looking for ways to get more computer business with the beef producers. We have studied and discussed some of the high tech ways RFID is being used to increase cattle and dairy productions in some parts of the world.
Feed Lots - Using automatic scales and sorting gates, feed lots can easily sort cattle into groups by weight, then feed the groups the best feed mixes to maximize weight gain. Sensors on the feeding troughs, alert operators early on to cows that aren't eating properly, possible early sign of disease. Record keeping for immunizations and other health records is simplified. One US feedlot in Nebraska estimated that they increased their profit per head by $10 per animal. Cost per tag, $4.00. They run 1 million head per year.
Dairy Farms - Most of the information I found about this came from European sources. RFID cattle are id'd as soon as they come in the barn. The feeding system keeps track of each cow and its lactation cycle. Automatically dispenses an exact amount of feed designed to maximize its milk production. It also identifies if the cow has eaten all of its feed. The milking equipment tracks the exact milk production of each cow instantly. Out in the lot, automatic feeders log when cows eat and how much they eat. Farmers can more accurately use these milk and feed records to identify good genetic lines. Health and vacination records are more accurate and simplified. Farms using such systems report 10-15% production gains, without the use of hormones.
I know it sounds boring, but when I was a kid, my family would make extra bucks as substiture milkers on small dairy farms (10-50 cows) when the families went on vacation. Based on my own experiances, I can see how much this stuff could do.
But it's really the fault of First Energy of Ohio