Feb 01, 2005This article was originally published by RFID Update.
February 1, 2005—The U.S. Department of Agriculture has earmarked $11.6 million for cattle-tracking projects in an effort to minimize risk from agroterrorism, mad cow, and other diseases. Of those funds, $800,000 will go to the state of Kansas, where Minnesota's pet- and animal-tracking specialist (and manufacturer of VeriChip) Digital Angel and livestock equipment producer Osborne Industries of Osborne, Kansas, will implement a cow-tracking system combining RFID, GPS, and cellular technology in 30 of the more than 400 tractor trailer trucks that move cattle around Kansas every day. As cows are loaded and unloaded from the trucks, identification information collected from RFID tags will be coupled with GPS-generated location information and sent by cell phone to a central database maintained by Kansas state health officials. Kansas is the perfect test bed for a sophisticated cattle-tracking system: as the dominant slaughterhouse state, beef is received by trucks coming from around the country, making it a sort of hub that is exposed to possible outbreaks originating in any corner of the cattle-producing U.S.
USA TODAY reports
