BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — The cow kept losing her ear tag. Again and again, she’d rub against a fence or a tree until the plastic tag, about the size of an index card, fell off.
So rancher David Watson had to improvise when tracking her in his Herd Production Records. "Big Red," he wrote in the space set aside for her tag number. Then he drew an awkward sketch of the crescent-shaped birthmark on her face.
In much of the country, that’s as scientific as cattle identification gets.
Millions of wild salmon have microchip IDs implanted in their bellies so biologists can track the fish individually as they navigate hydroelectric dams. Veterinarians inject similar microchips into dogs and cats and pet birds.
But the beef industry has never felt much need to keep tabs on each individual animal. Until now.
Responding to last month’s discovery of a Holstein infected with mad cow disease, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has called for a national livestock identification system.
Some beef ranchers resent the high-tech chips and sensors as too expensive and even too precise — they’re not sure they want consumers to know which farm produced which steak. Many others, however, share federal officials’ hopes that a national identification program will allow them to control disease outbreaks, limit economic losses — and help them run their ranches more efficiently.
Cattle today often are shuttled anonymously through three or four owners before they reach the slaughterhouse. Little, if any, paperwork identifies each animal individually.
That’s why it took federal veterinarians six days to find the infected Holstein’s birth farm in Canada. They still have not been able to locate more than a dozen dairy cows from her birth herd.
"Everyone’s getting more and more used to the idea of having to go to a national ID system," said Bim Nelson, a cattle auctioneer in Bassett, Neb. He still prefers the old-fashioned way of marking a cow, by branding it on the rump with a red-hot iron. But since the mad cow scare, he’ll grudgingly consider going high-tech. "It makes sense," he said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture plan, still sketchy, calls for tagging all 105 million U.S. cattle with the bovine equivalent of a Social Security number — an electronic code that will stay with the animal as it moves from ranch to feedlot, from state to state, from birth to slaughter. The European Union and Canada use that type of system.
In Kentucky, the state and the beef industry have each put up $4 million for a pilot ID program using radio-frequency tags, known as RFIDs. They look like thick buttons punched through the cow’s ear; each one emits a unique signal, which can be scanned with a hand-held wand.
Inventors are promoting all manner of livestock tracking technology, from implanted microchips to retinal scans to sensors that can be linked by satellite to the global positioning network.
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