In recent years, global animal epidemics have continued to break out, posing serious threats to people’s health and safety and dealing heavy blows to some regions, especially the livestock industry in Europe. For example, in April 1985, after the first case of mad cow disease appeared in the UK, the disease spread rapidly over the following decade, affecting countries around the world such as France, Ireland, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland, Oman, and Germany.
On December 23, 2003, the first case of mad cow disease was detected in the United States, shaking the country’s $27 billion cattle industry and prompting several major importers to immediately impose bans on American beef. Consequently, there has been growing emphasis on disease control, supervision, and prevention. Countries worldwide are actively developing and implementing policies and measures within animal husbandry and commerce to improve animal management. Animal identification and tracking have emerged as key strategies. For instance, the British government mandates the use of tracking and identification methods—including RFID ear tags—for livestock such as cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses. Similarly, after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture officially launched the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), which relies on RFID technology. Under this system, livestock are fitted with RFID ear tags from birth, and their information is registered in a national database, enabling continuous tracking within 48 hours. Research confirms that RFID technology significantly enhances the ability to identify and monitor animals across various farming systems, whether centralized, decentralized, or otherwise.
840 USDA HDX EID Ear Tags
China is a large agricultural country, and animal husbandry is one of the pillar industries of agriculture, both now and in the future. Animal husbandry products also play an important role in the circulation of domestic and foreign markets. However, in reality, problems such as delayed processing of livestock products, inadequate breeding systems for high-quality livestock breeds, lack of grassroots veterinary teams, and low levels of farmer organization have become obstacles to the development of China’s animal husbandry industry. Once a major epidemic caused by animals and their related products occurs, it will cause greater harm due to objective conditions such as China’s vast territory, large population, and high mobility of personnel. In the face of these issues, it is the trend to establish new development concepts and ideas to guide the development of animal husbandry. Seeking profits from technology, scale, and management has become a new characteristic of animal husbandry production.
Practice has proven that using RFID technology for livestock management can meet the above needs. Because RFID technology can not only achieve non-contact automatic identification, but also recognize multiple targets simultaneously, it can easily observe various situations of animals in management, including from birth to slaughter, and can timely obtain information in case of abnormalities in the supply chain such as animal breeding and slaughter, so as to take timely measures to avoid serious disasters and losses.
UHF 860-960 MHz Livestock RFID Ear Tag
In China, animal husbandry management based on RFID technology has begun to be used. In 2007, the No. 1 central document clearly proposed to establish and improve the animal identification and disease traceability system. In addition, the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law of the People’s Republic of China also gave clear instructions on the establishment of animal identification and disease traceability system. At present, the Ministry of Agriculture has started to build a national animal traceability system. The establishment of a comprehensive quality and safety traceability management system for beef cattle using RFID technology and electronic management principles has become an important component of the national key science and technology application project – the Ministry of Agriculture’s “984” project. According to reports, RFID traceability of beef has established a specialty point at the Capital Yichu Lianhua Supermarket, becoming the first reliable meat product in the capital market with full traceability. The Ministry of Agriculture of our country has also stipulated that since 2008, all livestock should wear animal ear tags according to regulations and use them to enter the market circulation and other links.
In Beijing, the use of ear tags, foot tags, and other methods for livestock and poultry products in breeding bases, as well as the application of IC cards, RFID, and other technologies in the slaughter and circulation process, to achieve full traceability of information on livestock and poultry product breeding, procurement, slaughter, segmentation, transportation, and sales has become one of the eight key areas of food safety work in Beijing. And it is stipulated that from August 1, 2008, only livestock wearing ear tags are allowed to enter the market circulation process in the city.
Sheep EID Ear Tags
In Shanghai, the information arrangement and supervision system for animals and their products supplied to Shanghai, developed by units such as the Shanghai Animal Health Supervision Institute, won the second prize of Shanghai Science and Technology Progress Award in 2006. This system utilizes RFID technology to achieve effective monitoring and management of animal products and hygiene. This project has been applied in 12 large-scale slaughterhouses, 8 city roads, and 167 breeding farms supplying Shanghai from other provinces and cities in Shanghai.
In addition, in recent years, various ministries and commissions in China have also paid great attention to the use of RFID technology in animal husbandry management. For example, the RFID electronic identification management system for animal husbandry and food industry in Qionglai City and the RFID based dairy cattle breeding management information system have been approved as the first batch of projects in the 2007 Science and Technology Innovation Fund for Small and Medium sized Enterprises.
1.Application standards and analysis of RFID in animal husbandry management
In the series of RFID application standards, ISO 11784/ISO 11785 standards are applied to animal identification. There is no specification for sample size in international labeling, so it can be designed in various styles suitable for animals, such as glass tubes, ear tags or collars, etc.
The ISO 11784 standard specifies the code structure for animal identification, which consists of 8 bytes of 64. The encoding method for bits 27-64 is determined by the country of use.
The ISO 11785 standard specifies technical guidelines for animal identification, including data transmission methods and reader/writer specifications. The working frequency is 134.2Khz, and there are two types of data transmission methods: full duplex and half duplex. Frequency shift keying modulation and reverse non return to zero coding are used.
In large-scale pig farms in Shanghai, breeding pigs are fixed on an RFID ear tag shortly after birth or entry. From then on, this pig will be tracked by the data network of the Shanghai pig safety production monitoring platform, and important attributes of the pig, such as vaccination, weight, medical history, lineage, etc., will be monitored at any time. Inside the pig farm, staff use handheld devices to read RFID tags and record various production operations, and then transmit the data back to the host through a wireless communication network. At the same time, the handheld device will display the breeding pig’s identification number, feeding records, and other relevant information, and provide necessary operational recommendations under the guidance of the expert system.
In terms of dairy farming, RFID tags are implanted in the stomachs of cows. With the help of the RFID system, every time a cow enters the milking parlor, the reader can identify each cow based on RFID. On the milking controller, the yield of each cow will be automatically recorded and analyzed to determine its milk production performance, lactation curve, and health status. In addition, the combination of RFID system and automatic feeding system can be used to control the accuracy and precision of feeding. During each feeding session, the system recognizes the identity of the cows and feeds them according to the pre-set formula.
2.The performance advantages of RFID in livestock management systems
The livestock management system based on RFID technology has the following advantages:
- Inductive data collection is used, which means that simply shake the ear tag attachment of the collector at the inspection point to read the current information. The operation is simple and convenient.
- Ear tags do not require wiring, are easy to install, and the setting of codes and the addition or removal of inspection points are also simple and convenient.
- The system tag has a unique ID code, which is durable and cannot be tampered with or copied.
- Intelligent tracking and management of each livestock can be carried out to track the source of the disease in the first time of the outbreak, in order to achieve timely prevention and control, trace the source, and minimize the loss of livestock.
- Information management, transparency, and timeliness allow managers at all levels to easily manage and quickly access various breeding information through the internet.
In animal husbandry management, RFID technology is combined with RFID tags as carriers and current computer network technology as means to achieve integrated monitoring of livestock from birth, slaughter to consumption through identification coding, identification wearing, identity recognition, information input and transmission, data analysis and query. It is an organic combination of animal breeding, epidemic prevention, quarantine, and supervision. This not only achieves fast and accurate traceability of animal epidemics, but also strengthens the full process management of livestock and poultry products from farm to table, thus realizing the scientific and institutionalized management of animal husbandry and improving the level of animal husbandry management. So the application of RFID technology in animal husbandry management has great prospects.