It didn’t take the COVID-19 pandemic to realize the importance of having a robust traceability system in place, but it certainly helped bring home the significance. Animal disease traceability has become a top concern for those in the cattle industry, and one program has made it its prerogative to increase the number of participants in an industry-wide traceability initiative.
U.S. CattleTrace first broke ground in the fall of 2017 in Kansas as CattleTrace Inc., after the Kansas Livestock Association (KLA) Cattle Feeders Council changed their policy on traceability to be mandatory for all cattle.
Callahan Grund, executive director of U.S. CattleTrace, called the policy groundbreaking. “That really brought to light how to find a solution for what traceability looks like for the cattle industry, primarily in Kansas at the time,” Grund told WLJ.
A collaborative group was formed to create a million-and-a-half-dollar pilot project, funded by the state of Kansas, the federal government, and private industry, that focused on what a traceability system could look like in the state of Kansas.
[inline_image file=”cbccc5608762ffe6e192a42f555a9d2b.jpg” caption=”Cattle at the Russell Livestock LLC line up with their RFID tags. U.S. CattleTrace currently has individual cow/calf producers, auction market, feedyard and state association members from 12 states. Photo courtesy of U.S. CattleTrace.”]
“We thought the state of Kansas was an excellent spot to then see if the pilot project was scalable on a national level, given the interstate movement of cattle and the ability for cattle to be born on a cow-calf operation and go all the way through to a packer in the state of Kansas,” Grund added.
The collaboration focused on three objectives in their pilot project: building an infrastructure; testing the infrastructure; and economics. Producer feedback was an important aspect to the project, and a 2016 World Perspectives report helped frame what producers were looking for in a traceability system. Grund said data privacy was one of the greatest priorities. The group worked with state and federal animal health officials to understand what data points were actually needed to conduct a disease traceback.
“We landed on four minimal data points: the animal ID; date; time; and GPS coordinates of where that animal had been read. There was no producer information pulled at that time,” Grund said.
CattleTrace Inc. was formed as a nonprofit organization, governed by a producer-led board of directors, who determined who could access data in the database. As a voluntary nonprofit organization, which owned the third-party database, the organization was therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act and requests from the government for data.
Producers also wanted a contact tracing system to be used in the event of an animal disease outbreak, which is really the premise of the program’s whole system. CattleTrace Inc. looked at a number of different technologies for contact tracing. In the pilot project, the group used ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags, and Grund still sees the tags as being a very good technology moving forward within the industry.
[inline_image file=”77804109f969c4f2fa8a630651ed5f63.jpg” caption=”A rancher inserts an ultra-high frequency tag in a steer at Manhattan Livestock Commission. RFID tags are utilized in the U.S. CattleTrace program to collect the four points of data inputted to the U.S. CattleTrace database. Photo courtesy of U.S. CattleTrace.”]
“I think the industry will learn and adapt to the opportunities that technology provides, but we also know there’s a lot of technology out there that’s been around for multiple years, such as low frequency radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags,” Grund said, “and we want to accept that data. So we’ve now got a way we can standardize and accept that data in an automatic format.”
Combining forces
In early 2020, U.S. Cattle Trace Inc. found an opportunity to combine forces with like-minded projects. Simultaneous to the CattleTrace pilot project, there were traceability projects going on in Texas, Florida and Kentucky. The groups met and decided they would be stronger together as one traceability voice in the industry, Grund said. The pilot project officially ended in June and CattleTrace and the other projects combined to form U.S. CattleTrace.
Value of traceability
Grund thinks animal traceability grows more important as the world becomes more globally connected.
“I think the opportunity to participate in building a hopefully nationally significant voluntary traceability system is a really good one,”
“If you look at the 2019 global beef exports, out of the top 10 beef exporting countries in the world, only two of those countries don’t have a traceability system in place—India and the U.S.” Grund said. “And India mainly exports water buffalo.”
As the U.S. has such a high-quality, safe product, it’s important to have the security of a traceability system if an outbreak were to occur, Grund said.
“I think the opportunity to participate in building a hopefully nationally significant voluntary traceability system is a really good one,” Grund said. “But I know economically, that doesn’t really affect a producer’s daily bottom line.”
This is why U.S. Cattle Trace hopes to transition from the pilot project to a fully funded membership organization by 2023, where producers have opportunities to add value to their operation by using traceability technology. Some companies in the industry utilize RFID technology as part of their value-added opportunities for producers, and U.S. Cattle Trace hopes to partner with them.
The organization currently has participation in 12 states from 130 cow-calf producers representing around 35,000 head of cattle; 18 feedyards with a total one-time capacity of around 900,000 head; and 14 auction markets which annually market around 1.2 million head of cattle. As the organization moves forward as a membership organization, state cattlemen’s associations are able to join and there are currently eight associations participating in the program.
Producer participation
Barb Downey of Downey Ranch, Inc. ranches in the Kansas Flinthills with her husband, Joe Carpenter, and daughters, Anna and Laura. Their 550-head cow herd includes both registered and commercial cows. Animal disease traceability has been at the forefront of the ranch’s operations, and as an active member of KLA, Downey became involved with U.S. CattleTrace from the very get-go.
[inline_image file=”0e316492629ca819a83368c46c1982d5.jpg” caption=”Barb Downey, Joe Carpenter, and daughters Anna and Laura. Photo by Scott Stebner.”]
“I’m old enough that I lived through the ‘cow that stole Christmas,’” Downey told WLJ, referring to the first outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the U.S. in 2003. “I was three or four days from shipping all of my calves to the feedyard, when the bottom just fell out. And I thought, ‘This is going to halfway ruin us.’”
Downey noted that, fortunately, the origins of the cow were able to be traced and some domestic trade was able to reopen. “That brought home to me the importance of traceability if you have an outbreak—and thankfully, it wasn’t something easily communicable. If it had been foot-and-mouth disease, who knows what would have happened?”
Downey emphasized the importance of the entire beef industry’s ability to know where disease exposure has happened to keep trade as open as possible. Knowing where an animal has been within hours, as opposed to weeks and months, gives a better chance at keeping the rest of the country relatively unaffected, she said.
[inline_image file=”7231827be2adae0fa16c1723534442ce.jpg” caption=”Downey Ranch cattlecoming for a read using in-house inventory management. Photo courtesy of Barb Downey.”]
Downey’s local sale barn is a cooperating entity of U.S. CattleTrace, so any cattle she brings to the barn will have a record of being from Downey Ranch, and then at the sale barn, so any possible exposure from other cattle at the sale barn on the same day can easily be traced back.
Same goes for any other cattle shipped to a feedyard. If USDA notified of a disease outbreak at a certain feedyard, and U.S. CattleTrace decided sharing data was warranted, the organization could release the data to USDA, and exposure could quickly be traced within a matter of hours.
Feedyard use
Wes Killion, president and chief operating officer of Beef Northwest Feeders, told WLJ that even before Beef Northwest was involved in U.S. CattleTrace, the company understood the importance of cattle traceability to the industry. About six years ago, the feedyard began tracking and identifying all cattle coming into the feedyard and their origins. Beef Northwest began using low-frequency tags, and started to explore using UHF tags when they were introduced to U.S. CattleTrace.
[inline_image file=”e3f25848f17499cd95e27ddf2d1d6c53.jpg” caption=”Cattle at Beef Northwest Feeders. Photo courtesy of Beef Northwest.”]
“What they were trying to do on a national level was very similar to what we were trying to do on our individual level,” Killion said. “Since we became a member it’s been very positive because we were on our own trying to figure out how it works from a business standpoint. CattleTrace has been able to provide opportunities to network with like-minded folks, from ranchers to seedstock producers to feeders, to all collaborate and work together—not just for individual interests, but also on a national level.”
Beef Northwest invested in the infrastructure and hardware required to log the animals every time they were in the range of a reader, which is then shared to the CattleTrace database.
[inline_image file=”21593a1e9d8af72cf997dba45b302090.jpg” caption=”Cattle at Beef Northwest Feeders. Photo by Beef Northwest.”]
Killion said tracking individual animals has a number of benefits and can answer the questions: Did a purchased animal stay healthy? Did its performance meet our expectations? How did that animal actually hang at the kill plant? The generated data has helped the company become better managers and operators, he said.
“The concern that Beef Northwest has regarding cattle traceability is really just being able to react in a very timely manner in the event that there’s some kind of herd health safety issue that comes up.” Killion said. “We’re looking at it much like an insurance policy and investing in it now is really going to help us in the future.”
