Will Verboven, Contributing Editor

Canadian ID Program Forges Ahead
It was four years ago that the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) launched its mandatory ID program for all cattle being marketed in Canada. At the time, the program had undergone endless debates complete with dire threats and woes of economic ruin.

All of that is now a dim memory and all the arguments against national ID now seem so trivial after BSE arrived in Canada. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a single opponent to mandatory ID tags, even among the early foes of the program.

BSE proved the worth of national cattle ID, but as BSE became so politicized and evolved into a marketing issue, the CCIA quickly moved to address both the concerns and the opportunities that were presented to Canadian beef and cattle marketers.

First, although it was always the intent of the CCIA to go from dangle ear tags with a barcode to electronic tags, the BSE crisis had them move the process more quickly. The change to electronic tags facilitated the possibility of additional value-added programs for producers and government regulators.

Next out of the gate was an age-verification program linked to the ID tags. This program was designed to take the guesswork out of age-verification usually done by dentition or carcass grading, both of which have significant shortcomings. This was initially done to facilitate the requirements of the USDA, who allow only beef and cattle under 30 months to be imported from Canada.

However, age-verification took on new importance when Japan began to state that if and when their border is opened, any beef will have to come from cattle under 20 months. It is clear that when it comes to age-verification, the Canadian program will give exporters an advantage over their U.S. counterparts. To date, over 850,000 head of calves are in the program with the 2006 calving season still ahead of us.

To bring the ID program to its next level, CCIA is putting in place an animal movement tracking program, verifying the location of every bovine in Canada. This is being done by placing electronic readers at movement points like auction markets, feedlots, community pastures and packing plants. By linking the readers to the central database via computers and the Internet, cattle can be quickly located – if the need arises. It’s about as close as you can get, short of putting a GPS locator chip on every animal.

The CCIA already has in place mechanisms that allow cattle performance, carcass data and beef branding programs to download that information from packers using individual producer numbers – all of it electronically. This is a voluntary program, but the potential is enormous in providing performance and genetics information right back to the feeder and the cow-calf operator.

The CCIA ID program and protocol has been so successful for cattle that their database also includes the national ID program for sheep and bison in Canada. Interestingly, Wisconsin has contracted with the CCIA to use their protocol and database. That may be a forerunner of how the ID issue will evolve in the U.S., since more American states have been in contact with the CCIA to see how it works and how they might follow Wisconsin’s lead.

Common sense would recognize the lead Canada has now developed in this whole area and it should behoove the USDA and U.S. cattle producer organizations to consider some sort of an arrangement with the CCIA. With today’s ever-evolving computer technology, it doesn’t really matter whether 10 million cattle are registered in a database or 100 million.

But that is unlikely. Politically, it would not sit well with some U.S. producer organizations to use a foreign agency, even if they are your best friend. Besides, government agencies are prone to re-inventing the wheel. I expect the USDA has already spent millions of dollars trying to come up with a national livestock ID system. Millions more will no doubt be spent as various parties wrestle over who will control what, when and how.

Pity really, especially for the U.S. taxpayer, when all the American cattle industry has to do is take advantage of what is happening up here in the Great White North .