A Central Alberta livestock auction market was among six in the province that took part in a traceability pilot project.
Between October 2009 and July 2010, scanning crews at the participating auction markets collected information from the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags of nearly 250,000 cattle. Despite working in extreme weather conditions and during busy sales periods, they met the performance goal of reading a minimum of 95 per cent of the animals with functioning RFID tags, with an additional 26,000 cattle age-verified at the checkpoints.
“We’re quite happy with the data we got from the reports,” said Rick Frederickson, senior manager of Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development’s traceability division.
He said the Alberta auction market pilot project was undertaken to see if the traceability technology would work without slowing trade down, and if it would operate in cold weather.
“In both cases the market owners told us they didn’t see any slowdown in the speed of commerce, and in fact the reader equipment worked quite well.”
The data collected was also uploaded successfully into the Canadian livestock tracking system, said Frederickson.
He said the auction markets that were the site of the pilot project have not been identified, but one was in Central Alberta, with others to the north, east and south.
“There was some sensitivities around the numbers we had in the reports,” explained Frederickson.
He said monitoring the movement of cattle at auction markets will be a key part of Alberta’s traceability system.
“From a disease emergency management standpoint it’s good to know when animals come in contact with other animals in case you have to do a trace-out to determine which animals may have been exposed.”
The results of the pilot project provide a foundation upon which to proceed, he said.
“It just basically allows us now to work with the auction markets to do some future work and future pilot projects to determine how we might add more value to their business process.”
The Alberta auction market pilot project was commissioned by Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development.
“We are pleased that this pilot project showed that there was little or no impact on wait times for cattle to be unloaded, or to the length of sales,” said Agriculture Minister Jack Hayden in a news release.
hrichards@www.reddeeradvocate.com