07/28/06 Electronic animal ID tags

Doctor Jim England and some of his associates have helped to identify about ten thousand cattle, and some buffalo too, with ear tags that can be read electronically. England is the director of the University of Idaho's Caine Veterinary Teaching Center near Caldwell. So what happened when he approached ranchers with the idea of using their animals. ENGLAND "80 percent of the ranchers are ready to go. There's probably ten percent of them ready to go but are kind of waiting a little bit to see what will happen in some of the technology and then there's a small percentage of, you know, not only 'no' but' dogone it not at all.'" England's project was one of eight in Idaho funded through a 1.2 million dollar grant. He worked with 16 cooperating ranchers, providing them with two dollar tags and helping them set up a record keeping system that they could apply to their operation. ENGLAND "At least for the early people in line it's going to be a value added thing. I mean I've got one producer that got a bonus of several dollars per hundred pounds simply because he could age and source verify his calves and they had the tags in their ears." England says they only had six of the electronic tags fail or quit working. That compares to an average loss of about eight percent of the bangle ear tags. Of the nearly ten thousand tags they were issued only one failed to work right out of the box. Today's Idaho Ag News Bill Scott