Among U.S. cattle producers, the need for a functional animal disease traceability system (ADT), one that would allow officials to rapidly and accurately trace a disease outbreak to its source, has long been a contentious issue. If, that is, it is thought about at all. While most producers understand the devastating impact to the production chain that an outbreak could have, as well as the need to minimize those impacts, the actual nuts and bolts of how to accomplish a tracking system rapidly gets lost in the minutia of data management issues and ill-fated government mandates.
Additionally, the specter of a widespread disease outbreak is an easy problem to forget when one is not actually occurring. For many, it takes something like the recent avian flu outbreak and its profound effect on the poultry industry, to bring to the forefront the question of how the beef industry would react in the face of a similar scenario.
A personal mission
However, for Kansas rancher Callahan Grund, the ADT issue is not only top-of-mind but has also become something of a crusade. As executive director of the nonprofit U.S. CattleTrace, Grund and other like-minded producers have made it a mission not only to develop a robust tracing system, but to do so in a way that is palatable to ranchers, feedlot owners and everyone else along the production chain.
For Grund, who was raised on and remains involved with a registered Gelbveih and Balancer operation in western Kansas, an interest in improving the industry’s ADT capabilities was first sparked while working as an intern for the Kansas Department of Agriculture (KDA) at a time when foreign animal disease was a primary concern for the agency. “They really opened my eyes to the vast nature of what we need,” Grund said. “What could happen during an outbreak, the planning and materials that are out there from an animal disease preparedness perspective, and where the gaps are.”
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Eventually, Grund’s internship resulted in a full-time position with KDA, where he remained focused on improving traceability. At the same time, Grund was serving on the advisory committee for something known as the CattleTrace pilot project, a grassroots effort spearheaded by cattlemen to improve traceability across all classes of cattle. In 2020, the group combined with similar efforts underway in Texas and Florida, and U.S. CattleTrace was formed, with Grund at the helm.
“Our focus is building a voluntary contact tracing system that can be utilized by health officials during a disease outbreak, built by producers for producers,” Grund said.
Ensuring data security
Efforts to improve traceability within the beef industry are not new. Under a 2013 mandate put in place by USDA, breeding-age beef cattle, as well as dairy and exhibition cattle, do have tracking requirements when crossing state lines. However, Grund points out that these requirements do not include feeder cattle, which comprise the vast majority of cattle movements and commingling nationwide.
Efforts by the USDA to mandate tracking of feeder cattle have long been stymied, in large part over concerns regarding the amount of data that a producer must share, who controls that data and what it is used for.
U.S. CattleTrace, Grund said, acknowledges those concerns not only by providing data security, but also by limiting data collection to information that allows for traceability.
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“We are solely focused on animal disease. We want to serve as a picket fence between the industry and animal health officials,” he said. “We want to be able to help animal health officials do their job in case of an outbreak, but not by sharing too much information,” he added. “Data security and privacy is really important to us, because we’re all producers as well.”
Utilizing new technologies
U.S. CattleTrace’s members are primarily utilizing radio frequency identification (RFID) ear tags for individual identification on their operations, the technology currently most suited to the task. With improvements to both tags and readers in recent years, Grund said, more and more producers, particularly in the feedlot sector, are already utilizing RFID technology for management purposes. For these operations, a traceback framework can be added with little or no change in day-to-day operations.
“The technology is finally there for RFID to be useful on an operational level for a lot of producers to increase efficiency,” Grund said. “That’s something that I think has really helped reinvigorate the traceability discussion.”
While new technologies are continually emerging, such as facial recognition, Grund pointed out that whatever technology is ultimately used needs to be hands free from a producer’s perspective, and functional at the current speed of commerce. “That’s the only way a traceability program will ever work, especially from a voluntary standpoint,” he said.
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In a perfect version of what U.S. CattleTrace is trying to achieve, Grund said, a calf would be tagged before leaving its ranch of origin. At each subsequent point of sale or commingling, the tag would be read. The only data collected would be the ID number of the animal along with the date, time and GPS coordinates of the read.
“Just those four data points,” he said. “There’s no personally identifiable information that we’re collecting. That data would then securely go into our database, only to be used in case of an outbreak,” he added.
When a diseased animal is identified, the primary concern for animal health officials is not just where the animal came from, but also its previous location, what other animals it commingled with at that location, the current locations of those animals and so on. Currently, when outbreaks occur in the U.S., animal health officials must attempt to track down all of this information using whatever records may be available locally at each feedlot, sale barn, slaughter facility, etc. The longer this process takes, the more cattle are moved around, the wider the net that must eventually be cast to contain the disease.
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“Under some of our current systems, they’ve got to cast a pretty wide net,” Grund said.
The wider the net, he added, the greater the impact on the industry as a whole. At a recent symposium held by the nonprofit, a mock dataset of cattle was used to illustrate the differences between the current traceback system and the one proposed by U.S. CattleTrace. The time taken to accomplish the traceback was nearly halved. “Our focus was to showcase what tools officials have out there today, and how severely that hampers business continuity in the face of an outbreak,” Grund said.
While producer participation in U.S. CattleTrace is currently small, Grund indicated that those that have joined are enthusiastic about the project.
“The mindset is definitely changing,” he explained. “The questions used to be ‘What is my liability?’ and ‘What is the risk to me within the industry?’ Now, the questions I hear are ‘How are we going to get this done?’ and ‘What can we do to move this forward?’
“I think the how and the why of this needs to be better educated across the industry,” he added. “As that continues to happen, I think more people will see the benefits of it.”
Worldwide, just two countries, the U.S. and India, lack a robust traceback system for beef cattle. While the need for one is apparent, Grund says that his passion lies in making sure that it is done right.
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“We want to build a system that works for us as cattlemen,” he said. “We don’t want the government to come in and give us one. We need it to be functional for us as producers, and still give animal health officials what they need to do their job.
“Currently, we are not prepared as an industry,” Grund continued. “If we have an outbreak of something, it’s not only going to have an impact nationally, it’s going to severely affect our rural communities.
“I think we have a major opportunity here to be proactive, rather than reactive, as an industry. If we can be proactive in this instance, we’ll be able to use a voluntary system, that we built ourselves, and protect our industry in the face of a disease outbreak,” he concluded.
