Rustling Part 4

Rustling Part 4. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Today we wrap up our conversation with Washington Cattlemen’s, Jack Field on the subject of cattle rustling. Rustling, while mostly thought of as an old western movie plot has been growing over the western United States as the price for a steer tops the $2000 mark. Branding is by far the easiest way to help keep track of your animals but branding has been around since the Middle Ages as a form of identifying livestock. And in this 21st century isn’t there something that would be better than the low tech cattle brand?

FIELD: The old proverb “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but brand is the cornerstone and the building block of identification and traceability in the western states. And the benefit that we have with our brand program would be the UDIS, Unified Information Database system. It ties together brand inspection documents, animal health certificates; if you look at the database at Jack Field it would have every brand inspection document that I had, every test or health document

Of course branding is not the only means of identifying cattle ownership.

FIELD: The benefit with the systems we have with the computers and infrastructure we can integrate and RFID tag, we can integrate other identifications whether it’s a breed registry - a tatoo, but the one nice thing about that brand, that’s not falling off. The brand very quickly - it is the fastest, most effective both economically timely manner of identifying an animal to its home ranch or home base.

Brand inspectors that work in a particular state are all quite familiar with each cattle brand and are good at spotting something that seems out of place. Marrying the brand with another means of identification can add extra security.

FIELD: And that’s the position where we’ve been going in terms of an association, the Washington Cattlemen’s Association as we look and comment on the federal program with animal disease and traceability and I’m in the process of typing comments to USDA asking them to fully recognize our brand program and the system we have as a template for us to move forward on animal disease traceability.

Just because a cow has a brand or tattoo or an RFID tag on it will not protect it from being rustled but if there is an attempt to sell that head of cattle the chances are that the rustler will get caught and of course prosecuted to the fullest degree.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.