USDA Pushes Plan to Move NAIS Forward

The USDA allocates and maintains records about standardized AIN numbers, beginning with when they are initially provided to an authorized label manufacturer. Tags utilizing proprietary AINs will be grandfathered in until they can be phased out.

With the official "840" AINs, when a livestock owner purchases tags from a supplier, the vendor first validates the premises identification number of the receiving location. The order will be processed only if there is a valid premises ID number. When a vendor ships an approved ear tag or injectable transponder imprinted or encoded with an AIN, the company reports the AIN, tag type, date shipped and premises number for the producer that received the tag—or the non-producer participant number if the device is sent to a reseller.

If the tags are distributed through resellers, those companies are responsible for reporting the distribution records to the AIN-management system, a USDA database that tracks the movement of tags encoded or printed with official AINs. In that database, the USDA maintains a complete listing of which particular AINs went to which premises. During an investigation into a sick animal or contaminated meat, this information would then provide a starting point for determining an animal's birthplace, or the location where that animal was first tagged.

With the RFID tags encoded with private AINs , tag manufacturers maintain their own records. When animal health officials find an animal that is sick or poses a risk to public health, they inspect the animal's tag, call the tag's manufacturer and ask the firm to identify the premises to which the tag was originally shipped. The manufacturer, however, is not required to keep or provide such a record.

If the tag was shipped to a distributor, the animal health official calls the distributor and requests information regarding where the tag was shipped. The distributor is not required to keep or provide this record either. "The record they provide may be a P.O. box with no good physical location," Wiklund says.

In addition, the USDA has been working with some major animal-traceability IT companies, such as AgInfoLink and Micro Beef Technologies, to develop the Animal Trace Processing System (ATPS) that would allow faster data acquisition by the USDA in the event of a disease outbreak.