With the introduction of mandatory identification tags for livestock, it is one more impost borne by the producer. But one producer believes he may the answer – an inexpensive tag with the ability to record a lifetime of activity for the particular animal.
Before returning to his family’s fine wool and cattle breeding property between Yass and Boorowa, Tom Gunthorpe had a successful career as an IT manager for a firm in Sydney.
In that capacity, he had written a lot of warehouse logistical software to track the extensive movement of various products.
“In those days we were using barcodes, but I had a project where I needed to use UHF RFID (radio frequency identification),” Mr Gunthorpe said.
“So I went and learnt as much as I could about this new technology.”
The RFID tags he was using for that project were exactly the same size as those his family were using on their sheep property to identify animals.
“It dawned on me – why don’t we use this technology in the sheep industry?”
Mr Gunthorpe said he spoke to quite a few people about the concept and their reaction was very encouraging, so he decided to pursue his interest further.
During trips to China he made contact with various manufacturers and a few prototype tags were developed.
“I based the model on the existing sheep tags as they were the predominate type people were using, and their familiarity would reduce barriers,” he said.
Mr Gunthorpe said further impetus was given to his project following an industry survey conducted by ABARES in which they sought producers thoughts on mandatory EID of sheep.
“Ninety three per cent said the costs were too high and there was little benefit to the producer,” he said. “But learning about the UHF RFID technology I knew it was always going to be cost effective.
“The reason for that is many other industries are taking up the technology for inventory management and that is driving the price down and the technology up.”
Mr Gunthorpe said he instinctively knew it was the right platform.
“Now I am basically bringing to the livestock industry what can be achieved by using this technology,” he said.
“The tags are writeable, so we can use the ID in similar format to NLIS (National Livestock Identification System), PIC (property identification code), gender, breed, year of birth as part of the three-letter sequence and the five-digit serial number which matches the printed number inside the tags.”
Industry benefits
Grazier come tech expert, Tom Gunthorpe, says his new UHF radio frequency identification tag is a game changer for the vaccine and drench history throughout an animal’s life.
“It can be seamless. We are recording treatment of animals and when the animal is sold whomever purchases it will immediately know it’s history, not just what is on a vendors declaration," he said.
In fact, Mr Gunthorpe, also the founder of ultrasound product company Agriscan, said the vendor declaration will only tell the buyer if the animal is still within a withholding period.
“It might only be a day out of the withholding period, but you don’t know when the last treatment was, there is no history,” he said. “To an extent, we have the true block-chain as there is a distributed data base within the tag.”
Mr Gunthorpe pointed out by using his technology – with the reader having a build-in GPS, they can geo-reference where tags are read and when connected to the internet, the livestock industry will give itself a chance to create meta data of where animals are based on the last read, with the added benefit of having transfers done in a timely and hands free manner.
“This tool will help and enable people to meet their regulatory requirements without having to do much,” he said.
“We will get a much bigger dashboard if you like, of all the animals in the country; where they are and what their movements are for example.”
Mr Gunthorpe said interest in the technology is being shown by industry and by the University of New England.
It was also presented at the recent MLA Redmeat Digital Forum held at Carwoola, Bungendore.
