Cattle ID system launched

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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

Cows are easier to herd than cats, and cows are normally easier to herd than cow owners.

Nonetheless, events of the past few days suggest that fiercely independent owners of cows, bulls and every neutered variation in between in Nebraska are giving up a bit of privacy and marching willingly toward a national animal identification network.

The Nebraska Department of Agriculture has launched its Nebraska Animal Verification Enhancement, or NAVE, system, which will assign a premise number to every livestock producer that requests one.

Public and private leaders of the livestock industry at the state and national levels are trying to respond to heightened concern about tracking down and isolating diseases as lethal as mad cow. They're also trying to accommodate heightened producer interest in delivering source-verifiable meat to the marketplace.

By assigning numbers electronically, first to livestock operations and later to each animal, accountability for results will rise to a level it has never reached before.

Greg Ibach, assistant state director of agriculture and a beef producer in Dawson County, drew the first premise number. Allen Bright of Antioch, president of the Nebraska Cattlemen, and Dave Hansen of Hartington, president of the Nebraska Pork Producers, were close behind.

"What this means," Ibach said, "is I've given the state some basic information about the location of my operation and the contact people. In case there's a disease concern in my area, … they'll know who to contact and to rapidly inform me of any steps I need to take to protect my operation."

The next step for those who come forward from among 25,000 beef production points and 3,000 hog farms will be more ambitious.

"The next step will be to start individually identifying animals," Ibach said, "and then recording the movements of the animals as they move from the cow-calf operation to the sale barn, to the feedlot and maybe to the meatpacking plant."

Even the first step means many things to many people.

For example:

* As part of a team of six students from the J.D. Edwards Honors Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, computer-engineering major Brian Kaiser of Overland Park, Kan., is excited about the software the students developed for the state's electronic numbering system.

Connecting with state agriculture officials and participating producers meant a lot to a 21-year-old from a Kansas City suburb.

"We get to go over there as students and work with real-world clients and actually make an impact," Kaiser said.

* As a leader of the 9-year-old Nebraska Corn-Fed Beef Program, Mike Briggs of Seward manages one of about 20 feedlots that will market a total of 50,000 head this year with a guarantee the animals were fed to finishing weight in the state.

Briggs enthusiastically supports NAVE, but he's already wondering how to keep a sales edge for his own source-verified product at a time when source verification will become much more common.

Still, "I feel we have to do this from the animal-safety aspect of it," Briggs said. "We have to do it."

* As the president of a Norfolk company that has offered electronic ear tags and data-tracking services for cattle for the past 13 years, Van Neidig is wondering how much of the identification role will stay in the profit-oriented private sector and how much of it will go public.

Neidig promises full cooperation.

"But from the president's desk, so to speak, of a company that's for profit, I'm concerned with the intensity of the playing field. And I'm not fully clear on the intentions of those running it from an elected or appointed standpoint."

Perhaps the most important question: Will this be market-driven or regulation-driven?

In trying to measure how fast animal-specific identification might move, one doesn't need to think voluntary or mandatory, Neidig said. Think of McDonald's and other retail giants trying to read consumers' minds and protect themselves from meat recalls.
He predicts "double-digit percentages in the nation's calf herd beginning with the '05 calf crop" without any government mandate.

When it comes to tracking movement of cattle from birth to market slaughter, Neidig said, "we know we can do it and we do it quite well. And we've done it for 13 years now from a voluntary, private-sector business."

Briggs, also in the first wave of producers getting premise numbers, shares the preference for a system the government monitors over a system the government runs — as long as the emphasis is on action.

"I'd much rather the industry did it in the private sector," he said. "But the industry, quite frankly, needs a kick in the pants to get it done."

UNL student Kaiser, although he describes himself as "pretty new, especially to livestock," can't see a downside to a system that both guards against the spread of disease and promotes excellence in meat quality.

He points to Japan — recent scene of another case of mad cow disease of its own and scene of an ongoing ban against U.S. beef. The ban followed a December incident in which a Canadian cow tested positive for the disease in Washington state.

If it's source assurance the Japanese want at a time of a future disease incident, Kaiser said, those assurances come with a system now taking shape in a first wave of states that includes Nebraska, Wisconsin and Illinois.

"They'll have no reason to cut off exports," he said, "because we've got it isolated down to a specific farm that caused the problem."

Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.