I have heard several veterinarians and animal welfare scientists discuss if branding in its original form is even needed today. Lots has changed from the days of the wide-open range where cattle were mixed and the brand was the only proof of ownership.

We have better retention identification tags, most herds aren’t mixed, cattle very seldom escape, and we can even do DNA testing if we have to. If we do brand, there are ways to minimize the pain (or make the characters smaller or use less of them).

I wrote about this topic over 15 years ago — and got lots of flack and letters to the editor. I will see if this article further stirs up discussion on a topic that has been skirted around.

There is a cost of branding in terms of labour along with stress on the calf and pain it causes. It may be the greatest single processing cost to the industry, and one that has almost no upside. Before the advent of ear tagging and when vast ranges were shared, it was necessary for herd identification. Now better retention ear tags doubled up with CCIA tags (and in feedlots sometimes tripled up with dangle pen tags), individual identification is rarely in question. In the event of legal disputes over ownership, there have been rare cases that have been solved with DNA samples of hair. But brands can be altered, new brands applied, and disappear when rustled cattle are butchered and skinned.

We need to strongly press the issue of financial organizations in the west asking for brands. Feeder associations should lead on this issue. They have required the split bar which albeit identifies cattle as feeder association cattle. It becomes a big brand and if cattle are refinanced through other members of the family, requires yet again another brand. (No wonder hides soon have no value as they are pockmarked with brands. We see this with trader cows where multiple brands are evident.)

Our own CFIA needs to take the moral high ground and push to eliminate the need for branding with the C (upside down V) N going into the U.S. This imposes unnecessary costs and pain for the cattle even though we have CCIA tags and the necessary paperwork and disease status to enter. The same requirement is not there for cattle entering Canada from the U.S. which was odd right from the beginning.

Even if ranchers started by eliminating branding to only their replacement heifers, there is still the need to do all the other processing procedures in the spring including castrating. Most producers have started giving NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) such as meloxicam or banamine to all the calves at spring processing. Castrating is deemed to cause the biggest amount of pain but the heifers were also branded so treating with painkillers at branding time is becoming routine. Many put onẲ a soothing product (such as aloe vera or other sprays) to promote healing. Most see the need to give something for pain when cattle are branded or to promote healing.

The national Beef Code of Practice recognizes this: “When branding is required for export, by policy, or as permanent proof of ownership, it must be performed with the proper equipment, restraint and by personnel with training or sufficient combination of knowledge and experience to minimize pain to the animal.”

The code also says producers should minimize size of brands, should not rebrand, and states face branding is not legal. (This is a good time to mention that identification methods such as ear splitting; creating the wattles on the dewlap or cheek; cutting the end of the ears off; or ear notching — although not talked about — probably need to be identified as not appropriate anymore.)

It all comes down to the social licence. And quite frankly, I don’t see the need anymore. (We can’t avoid the occasional ear ripping occurring from ear tagging, but the breakaway ear taggers really help prevent that.)

I can only hope that those who brand at least give NSAIDs (either at the time or preferably before). Technically veterinarians would need to prescribe them for those procedures, and I don’t know many who would agree with those processes.

Today, only about 10 per cent of cattle are branded — and it occurs almost exclusively in the three most western provinces. I once had a very knowledgeable producer from Ontario say he thought it must be illegal not to brand cattle in the west. I said no, it just seems this way.

Community pastures in Alberta even require a lot number or patron number on a tag, so again, there is very little need to brand in my opinion. Some forward-thinking grazing boards maybe need to put this issue on the agenda. I know many producers who only brand the calves going to the grazing reserves these days. Branding is barely done anymore in the northern half of Alberta, so we all need to try and convince policy-makers for financial institutions, such as banks or feeder associations and grazing reserves to seriously look at these long-standing requirements.

The rest is up to you, the producers. Decrease usage wherever possible and if absolutely necessary, use NSAIDs or other pain control treatments as prescribed by your veterinarian.

We need to keep reducing the necessity to brand wherever possible as it is part of that social licence for raising cattle.

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Canada’s PigTrace program will be raising ear tag prices as of Aug. 1.

Prices will go up 20 cents for every small ear tag and 35 cents for every large ear tag, a release from the Manitoba Pork Council said.

The Manitoba Pork Council is urging producers to buy into the program, despite the increased cost. Both the provincial and national pork councils cite PigTrace is Canada’s effort to prepare for African swine fever and limit impact if the deadly disease is found in Canada.

The program will be critical for zoning, both the Manitoba council and Canadian Pork Council say.

Canada has renewed or updated zoning understandings with both the U.S. and European Union in recent months as fear of African swine fever grows.

The virus has yet to spread to North America, although Reuters recently reported outbreaks in China may have claimed up to half that country’s hogs, flying in the face of the much lower official estimates.

“With increased foreign animal disease risk putting traceability at the centre of preparedness and zoning activities, PigTrace is more important than ever,” the Manitoba Pork Council said.

“These price increases are a necessary step towards maintaining the long-term financial sustainability of the program due to increasing operational costs.”

The jump will not apply for any order made and paid for by July 31, the council said.

— Reporting for the Manitoba Co-operator by Alexis Stockford.

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The overall tag retention rate for calves exceeded 96 per cent while tag retention for yearlings ranged from 98 to 100 per cent. However, the average tag retention rate for mature cows was 82 per cent — an “unsatisfactory” level, said Paul Laronde, the organization’s ag and technology manager.

A followup will look at tag material degradation that results in tag loss. The full report can be found on the home page of canadaid.ca.

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The lab, located at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s (SAIT) Applied Research and Innovation Services (ARIS) department in Calgary, is one of only three certified animal RFID testing labs in the world and the only one in North America. It is also one of two labs capable of testing tags at temperatures of -35 C and below.

SAIT’s decision to seek International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR) certification was driven by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s new testing framework which requires tags be tested in an ICAR-certified lab capable of testing tags at -35 C. This also allows animal tag manufacturers to certify locally rather than in Europe.

This is important for the country’s animal traceability efforts, said Paul Laronde, tag and technology manager for the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency.

“In other parts of the world, they test tags at room temperature or a little below, and that’s fine, but in Canada we know producers apply tags in winter conditions,” he said.

“They leave tags out in their trucks in the winter and in some cases that could be -35 C or below. Tags are plastic for the most part and plastic loses elasticity the colder it gets so they become brittle, less flexible, and when you try to apply them it takes more force.”

Cold weather woes

An RFID tag works in conjunction with an RFID reader and each tag carries a globally unique number allowing the animal to be tracked from its point of origin to either its point of export or carcass inspection using the Canadian Livestock Tracking System database.

“A reader is essentially a box with an antenna connected to it,” said Laronde. “Inside the box is some circuitry that talks to the tag by sending out an electromagnetic wave that powers the tag up. The tag absorbs the energy and with that energy it sends back the unique number on its microchip.”

There is a regulatory approval process administered by the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency for cattle tags that takes place before tags can be sold to livestock operators. The SAIT lab is a part of this process.

The lab looks at two main areas of tag functionality, said Bob Davies, project lead and quality manager with ARIS.

“One is electrical: Can we read the RFID part of the tag? There’s also the tag assembly — how it goes into the cow’s ear and how it stands up mechanically.”

A couple of things can go wrong in very cold weather, he said.

“One is they can come apart. The other is they just don’t apply very well. The tag is very brittle and the force required to apply the tag to the cow’s ear is very high,” said Davies.

“We test things like how much force is required to couple a tag together. We also take a look at the force required to decouple the tag. When the tag comes apart, it has to be very evident that it was used before. For example, the male part gets left inside the female part of the tag so it can’t be reused.”

Although tag failure is not common, when it does happen it can have a significant impact across the value chain, said Davies.

“If you have a failure rate of two per cent, you have to multiply that two per cent by the cost of tracing that animal back when it goes into the slaughterhouse without a tag. It’s significant enough for CFIA to implement its own framework for testing.”

Internationally certified

SAIT’s decision to become an RFID testing facility came about from discussions with the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency, CFIA, ICAR, Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, and the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency.

“We were aware that tags had to go to Europe, which increases the time for getting samples over there and getting information back. It was also quite expensive,” said Laronde.

“Someone suggested that perhaps there should be one in Canada and that SAIT had an appropriate facility. The conversation started with them and there was interest. We decided they had the facilities, knowledge, and personnel to set the lab up to meet the ICAR standard.”

To receive ICAR accreditation, the test lab also had to be accredited by the International Standards Organization, which establishes worldwide standards. Armed with approximately $500,000 in funding from the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency, SAIT proceeded to achieve ISO approval in 2012 and ICAR accreditation in February of this year.

“We turned this lab into a one-stop shop for CFIA’s required testing,” said Davies.

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The agency has enabled system users to submit an Import event for any foreign country tag ID numbers. The supported format is 15 digits in length, starting with the country code.

Since current regulations only permit the farm of origin to age verify an animal, a final owner may receive less than market value for an incorrectly age-verified animal if a birthdate entry is in the database.

The system now sends a digital alert designed to prevent duplicate birthdate data entry reporting on the same tags.

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“The typical button tag has been around for a long time and works very well, but it’s in a low-frequency spectrum and the read range is therefore very, very short,” said Glen Kathler, applied research chair of the Radio Frequency Identification Application Development Lab at SAIT Polytechnic.

“With this ultra-high radio frequency technology, now you have a tag that you can read from up to 20 feet away, and you can also read more than one tag at a time.”

The Calgary school was approached in 2011 by Livestock Identification Services to see if there was technology to improve cattle traceability. LIS and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency were interested in things such as real-time tracking of cattle during transport and enhanced disease traceability when animals commingle.

“We looked at the whole supply chain, right from the producer all the way to the packing plant — with stops at the auction markets, the feedlots, and the transport companies — to see where some of the biggest gaps are,” said Kathler.

Ultra-high-frequency RFID tracking — widely used in areas as diverse as oil and gas, manufacturing, and prisons — seemed like the way to go, not just for agencies like LIS but also producers. Kathler uses the example of a producer loading cattle or moving them to a new pasture.

“He could literally take something out of his saddlebag, stick it into a fence post for 20 minutes while he moved animals, and it would just read all of the tags of the animals going through the gate,” said Kathler.

“It’s very automated, and it simply creates a higher level of accuracy as opposed to trying to read something visually, as well as having to be so close to an animal that you can read a tag with a low-frequency wand reader.”

The technology would also be highly useful at auction marts for tracking animals from pre-sale pens through to loading. But it’s feedlots that stand to gain the most, he said.

“Just the ability to sort animals, to move animals, and to read tags without adding any additional stress by having them go through the squeeze chute was a big attraction for that particular market,” said Kathler, adding cattle are conservatively estimated to lose one per cent of body weight from stress each time they go through a squeeze chute.

“We showed that if you could eliminate even one of the trips through the squeeze chute to get its tag read, there’s a significant cost savings because there simply would be no stress on the animal. They don’t know they’re being read. They’re not being squeezed. They’re just being moved from one pen to another.”

Other benefits

And because the system can read multiple tags at once, there’s a big time savings, too.

“We can have animals go through a wide alley as they’re sorting from pen to pen, and we can read all the tags, even if they’re going one at a time or we’re bunching them 20 or 30 or 200 or 300 at a time through the alley.”

Ultra-high-frequency systems are also one-tenth the cost of their low-frequency cousins, and have impressive accuracy.

“We did roughly 4,000 squeeze chute tag reads, and we only ever read the tag we were trying to read,” said Kathler. “People were wondering if they were going to read all the animals in the tub way behind the animal in the squeeze chute, and we showed that you only read the animal in the squeeze chute.”

His team also installed readers in two cattle liners and hauled a few loads to Cargill’s High River plant.

“We captured a real-time cloud-based manifest of the 48 animals and the exact inventory list of those animals,” said Kathler. “The reader on the liner automatically uploaded its loading and unloading manifest into the cloud, and we were able to compare those two manifests to show that there is the ability with this technology to create this automated shipping manifest that would allow for better traceability.”

More testing is planned for this spring at Olds College, which will allow researchers to study a single herd for 35 to 40 weeks.

But while everything has been highly promising so far, widespread adoption of the technology is a ways off.

“It is probably in the three- to five-year window before it would even be approved for use in traceability,” said Kathler, adding that he expects the feedlot sector will be keenest to adopt the technology.

There may be a period when both technologies exist side by side, and one tag manufacturer is making a dual-purpose tag, with both low-frequency and high-frequency components.

“In essence, the tag could be approved for use by the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency for its low-frequency capabilities, but it now also has this ultra-high-frequency portion to it as well.”

Kathler’s team has also developed a smartphone reader that can read both types of tags.

“We’re trying to look at as many ways as possible when it comes time to transition to make it as easy as possible for any portion of the industry to consider adopting it.”

The four-year, $1-million research project was funded by the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency.

The post Taking cattle tag reading to the next level appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“There is a lot of back and forth within the industry as to the effectiveness of these tags, and a lot of the cow-calf producers were identifying concerns about the longevity of the tags,” said Ross MacDonald, project manager for the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) tag retention project.

“But really, there was no hard data out there. This project is the first step in saying yes, there does appear to be a problem in these areas.”

The project began in 2011 with more than 5,000 animals tagged to look at how ear tags perform in calves and mature cows in Western Canada.

“We’re evaluating not only gross retention across the country, but also retention between those individual brands and retention between various locations of the cow herds,” said MacDonald, who ranches near Lake Alma, Sask.

And so far, the data “reflects some of the concerns in the industry.”

“Across the country, there are complaints about the performance of the tags, so the fact that we’ve identified that there’s a legitimate issue is paramount,” said MacDonald.

In calves, tag retention is “almost 100 per cent” up to 18 months of age, but mature calves average around 90 per cent retention — a full 10 per cent drop after cows hit 18 months. And in some cows, tag loss ranged from three per cent to an astonishing 35 per cent.

“It’s not really the calves where there’s a huge issue. They retain their tags just fine,” said MacDonald. “Really, it’s the mature cows that seem to be the thorn in some producers’ sides.”

And though the project wasn’t designed to track the exact means of loss, the anecdotal evidence is that there is “pretty consistent plastic breakdown” on the tags. The seven brands of tags used were all applied according to manufacturers’ directions, and in calves, that was enough to help improve retention.

“On the young cattle, we seem to have demonstrated that when tagged according to manufacturers’ directions, retention can be expected to be near 100 per cent,” said MacDonald.

But for mature cows, the process is a little trickier, and MacDonald has seen that things like facilities, restraints, and weather all seem to have a role in tag retention.

“It’s allowed the discussion to move beyond general complaints. We’re starting to dial in on where the more specific roadblocks or challenges are,” he said.

“If there are ways to narrow the scope as to which methods, which tags, and at what temperatures you can have the best chance of keeping those tags in there long term, that’s all pretty relevant information.”

Once the project is completed this year, the results will be used to drive policy changes to address the “legitimate concern” producers have with existing tags.

“With this information, the corresponding policy steps will follow and the corresponding decisions can be made as to where Canada’s ready to go in terms of cattle traceability,” said MacDonald.

On his own farm, tag retention is “definitely an issue” — one that goes beyond mere frustration by hitting his bottom line.

“You don’t want to invest the time and dollars in tagging an animal with the expectation it’s going to be there for the life of that animal and then at some point you have to go back and redo it,” said MacDonald.

“I think most people want to know that when they tag an animal and go to ship that animal, that tag is still there.”

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