| Age verification key for beef industry; CCIA |
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| Local Content - Agriculture |
| Written by Trevor Busch |
| Wednesday, 03 February 2010 16:24 |
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If the province’s livestock industry is to be successful in breaking into new foreign markets and bringing export levels back up to pre-BSE levels, age verification and traceability will be an integral part of making the industry viable. At the Beef Workshop held at the Heritage Inn last Thursday, a crowd of producers listened to Amberley Sparry, the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency mobile field representative for southern Alberta, who gave tips on proper procedures and documentation. “Basically, my job is to make age verification easier for you. As mobile field representative for southern Alberta, I do workshops, information sessions, and speak at functions like we’re at today, and as well I try to make it to all the regular sales at the auction markets in my territory, where I get to work with producers on a one-to-one basis, and I will teach them how to do the age verification process, or, in some cases, do it for them.” As part of the new legislation regarding age verification and traceability in the province, RFID tags are now required as the industry standard. “As most of you know, in 2006, we did the transition from the bar-code tag to the RFID tag (radio-frequency identification),” said Sparry. “At that time, it also became mandated that all animals leaving the herd of origin have a tag in their ears. One of the reasons to go to the RFID button is it’s a smaller tag — it doesn’t fall out as easily. For ideal tag placement, if it’s really deep in the ear, generally it doesn’t fall off. To improve tag retention, we recommend as close as you can get it to the head, deep inside. This tag was designed for electronic reading, not line of sight, so we shouldn’t have to be able read it. And hopefully if we do, we shouldn’t have to do that again with our record keeping, we should have that number in our records. It’s been tested, and it has been approved, and it provides a record so that we can trace back information.” The new tags are better suited to the demands of age verification and ease of information collection, added Sparry. “The tag gets approved by us at CCIA, and then goes to the manufacturer, and then it goes to the distributor, and then the dealer, which would be UFA or Co-Op, or a vet clinic or any livestock service, where we all buy our products from. From there, they issue them to you. So that’s where you get your name on them, and then the things that get attached further along the line are usually things that we generally link to them, like age verification or movement events for feedlots. So it’s great for having all the information attached to it. One of the things that’s extremely important is that if you’re using an Allflex or a Destron or a Zee tag, that you use the corresponding applicator.” Birth certificates amount to a passport for the livestock, according to Sparry. “The birth certificate is designed as a security, more or less for the auction market or for when you’re selling yourself, it’s a proof that you have those animals age verified. It’s a document saying the tag number, how old they are, and the months the birth certificate was created.” There are differing methods regarding recording information, but both are adequate. “By the Alberta government, all of our cattle need to be age verified as of Jan. 1, 2009. So, we’re into our second year of that. And you can be accessing the Canadian Livestock Tracking System (CLTS), and you can access that through the CCIA’s main page. Just a little bit of information on age verification — as we all know it’s the CCIA number directly associated with the calving date. There are two different ways that we can be uploading that information. A very common method that I run into quite frequently is that a lot of producers believe that we need to be doing every animal individually. If this is how you already run your records that’s fantastic, but you can be doing it at the calving start date. So we try to go right around the 90 day/three month period, so most of us have calving periods within that time frame. If that’s the case, we can just be going off your calving start date, which makes things quite a bit simpler,” said Sparry. It is important for the industry to accept the new regulations both from a profit perspective and to break into new markets, she added. “I’d like to talk briefly about the benefits of age verification. As you all know, our trade partners are proposing that we need age verification as a pre-requisite to exporting cattle in domestic or international markets. That’s for either opening them or maintaining them there. In addition, age verification benefits some of the other events that we have attached to the CLTS, whether that be the full animal movement tracking, which is the feedlots. Since Jan. 1, 2009 all feedlots over 5,000 head have been reporting all animals coming into their feedlots. So that’s attached as an event onto that tag.” Sparry wrapped up the presentation with a collection of tips for producers regarding age verification. “So there’s some different tricks and tips for age verification. I don’t want to change how you’re recording your calving books or do anything like that, I just want to make things easier for you. So come fall, or when you’re done calving or whatever and you want to age verify your cattle, that it’s not as much of a task if you know the information. So my first recommendation to you is that when you’re buying your CCIA tags, get them in order. As a rule and a management practice, the dealers have most of their tags in sequential order already, but if you’re buying more than one package it makes it a lot easier so that we can say I’ve got one to 200 as opposed to one to 100 and three to 400. It just works a lot easier that way. As well, write the tag range down in the front of your calving book. The reason I say this is, for those of us who tag at branding, and we don’t do individual dates, it’s quite a bit simpler for us just to write the tag range in the front of the book, and that way by process of elimination, we can say we’ve only got 10 tags left over, all the others went into my 2010 herd, those are the ones we’re going to age verify. We have run into a few problems before, which have been resolved, where we don’t know what numbers they are, some of them have went to cow culls, some of them went into bulls, and that’s how we’ve run into problems. So this is something that we’ve kind of thought up just for that purpose.” |
