Livestock Identification Using Ear tags

Milk, meat, and all the products of the animals’ supply chain are constructed on traceability. Identification and traceability denote the starting point for every commercial operation. This is because animals spend their lives in one place and are moved to a slaughterhouse or sold when the time arrives. Animal ear tags are the best for their identification.

It is highly suggested that each animal kept on a farm has some sort of identity to enable and guarantee a virtuous process at the source while managing farms. Farmers may track their herd from birth through slaughter, keeping track of weight gain, milk output, pregnancies and deliveries, medical treatments, and previous illnesses, among other things.

Animal Identification Benefits For Farmers:

• The identification of animals and the record-keeping assists farmers in making the right decision to discard unwell animals in a group.
• In the long term, you can track the history of animals. Also, identify the good and bad performers and the information that managed to make sure the maximization of profit.
• A farmer can combine the output data of animals via the adoption of specific managing software.
• Animals must be tracked down the food chain from farmer to slaughter or retail, and tracing, which is the capacity to trace a meat product up the supply chain using records preserved at each stage, is required for effective systems.
• Transparency, traceability, and quality assurance are the main points for the livestock product assurance and approval schemes. Traceability depends on effective livestock identification and movement recording.
• In many countries, it is mandatory to identify farmed animals, and the movements of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs must be registered both on the farm and electronically.

Animal Identification Methods:

Ear Tags:

Wherever animal identity is required or requested for certain activities, National Regulatory Bodies supervise the sale and distribution of any means of identification, at the very least to keep track of the quantity of livestock registered in the farm owner’s name. When a farmer buys tags, the person can use an applicator to apply them to the animals.

Non-Electronic Ear tags:

On both commercial and collaborative farms, this is the most common type of ear tag. Different color tags are simple to attach and can be used to identify the breeding herd or sire lines. The farmer may choose to add additional numbers or letters to the tag numbers.

Electronic Ear tags:

Electronic ear tags leveraging RFID technology, also known as electronic identification (EID), allow a herd’s performance to be better managed. EID is frequently used by commercial dairy farmers. They make data collection from tags embedded in microchips faster and easier.