Sheep Ear Tag Identification Technology Being Tested

The USDA's National Scrapie Eradication Program has introduced a new disease management grant that includes providing electronic identification tags for sheep producers. This grant will focus primarily on sale barns in Oregon, where many EID tags are currently being utilized by producers for sheep and cattle, that according to American Sheep Industry Executive Director, Peter Orwick

“So what we've done so far with the ID- we did a video for USDA working with actually a sale barn in Colorado, primarily to show USDA, the technology isn't there for sheep yet to move at speed commerce. And that was the point of of that. And now we're taking it to the next step to show for some that are getting close. How are they doing it? And of course, from the sheep industry standpoint, we've had, you know, mature sheep ID interstate requirements for over two decades because of the scrapie program. So we have a lot of the base in there. The difference is is we haven't moved to the EID format. We're still on the on the metal tag.”

Orwick says economics play a factor in this situation as spending $3 - $4 dollars per tag per sheep is just not feasible and the technology is just not quite there yet.