Feb 02, 2009Ranchers and other producers and handlers of livestock will soon have a new tool at their disposal for tracking the locations of animals in real time, and with greater precision. RFID vendor Digital Angel has announced a new, battery-powered animal identification tag, known as the r.Tag, that the company says can be read from up to 100 feet away. The r.Tag, according to Digital Angel, allows more efficient, accurate livestock tracking than is presently available using other tags.
Passive RFID tags operating at 134.2 kHz, and compliant with the ISO 11784 and 11785 RFID tag standards, have long been utilized for livestock identification. The tags must be located within a few inches of an interrogator in order to be read, however, requiring livestock producers to force animals to move through narrow checkpoints to be counted, and making it impossible to read the tags of a large number of animals simultaneously.
The r.Tag can be set to transmit an identification number at a regular interval. According to David Sullivan, president of Destron Fearing, the Digital Angel subsidiary that is bringing the r.Tag system to market, this signal is sent at 2.45 GHz to readers that can then relay that data to other interrogators located up to 100 feet away, passing the information through a mesh network until it reaches a receiver, where it can be collected and processed. Sullivan says the r.Tag and readers employ a proprietary air-interface protocol to transmit and receive tag data.
The tags can hold up to 256 bytes of data, and are built into an ear-tag form factor that looks similar to the passive RFID ear tags also sold by Destron Fearing, though the r.Tag is thicker in size due to its battery.
The readers are weatherproof, making them well suited for wide distribution on a farm or in some other rural area. Each interrogator is powered through a small solar panel, which also charges an onboard battery so the reader can operate for up to two sunless weeks. A single reader can interrogate a maximum of 310 tags within its read range. Each tag, Sullivan explains, transmits for milliseconds, and the reader sees them as they talk. "At a certain point," he says, "we reach a point of diminishing return, and therefore we hold to the fact that one reader can see about 310 tags. Beyond that would require a second reader."
Each system will also require one receiver, which acts as an aggregator of data from the distributed network of readers in the field, and which can be connected to a laptop via a USB port. Users could then link the tag data to a database management system, such as that offered by Global Animal Management.
Destron Fearing is still setting costs for the system, Sullivan says, which will be generally available in mid-2009. However, he notes, the tags will likely cost roughly $3.50 apiece. The reader will be priced between $75 and $100, while the external antenna is expected to cost $50. The receiver will also run between $75 and $100.
When asked about possible applications for the r.Tag, Sullivan proposes two uses that today's passive tags are unable to support. In one scenario, a rancher would place interrogators, with external antennas, near water and food sources within a large field. Over time, ranchers could then harvest, from the main tag database, the identities of individual cattle or other livestock making fewer approaches to the water or food. Because decreased interest in food and water is indicative of a health problem, the workers could then physically examine the animals that seldom visit these monitored areas, in order to assess whether they are ill. "This could also be important for being able to quickly quarantine animals struck with a contagious virus," he adds.
Additionally, Sullivan says, the r.Tag platform is useful for animal auctions. At such auctions, entire truckloads of livestock arrive at and move through different zones. This would save significant time over the use of passive tag technology, since the animals would need to be approached individually using a handheld reader, or moved through a narrow gate in order to be inventoried onsite.
Jim Heinle, president of Global Animal Management, believes active tags present significant benefits unavailable with passive tags, and that they might go far to increase interest in RFID tracking among livestock producers.
"The use of passive RFID systems continues to grow, but not at the rate that people might have predicted three or four years ago," Heinle says, attributing the slow growth to the limited read range of passive tags, as well as their vulnerability to RF interference. The benefits that active tags offer producers, he adds, could trigger a "revolutionary change" in RFID adoption in the industry.
It remains to be seen whether the added read distance and ability to identify large numbers of livestock in groups will persuade producers who have not yet invested in passive RFID systems to begin using the r.Tag platform. However, Sullivan notes that three different livestock producers—a feed lot and two farms—have been beta-testing the tags and readers for up to 18 months, and with good results. The tags have withstood temperatures down to -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-29 degrees Celsius), he adds.
Destron Fearing introduced the r.Tag system at the 2009 Annual Cattle Industry Convention and National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) Trade Show, which was held on Jan. 28-31 in Phoenix, Ariz. A live demo of the system can be viewed online.
