Ag innovator designs new electronic sheep tag

One farmer who is also a technological innovator is Tom Gunthorpe, a director and founder of Agriscan Pty Ltd, while continuing to raise cattle and sheep on the family farm Mt Buffalo, Rye Park.

His latest project is the joint development of high performance UHF RFID reader and the manufacture of UHF RFID sheep tags.

"I've been working on this technology since 2014 and over that time we have developed tags, we've developed a reader and then interesting enough through Covid we developed all of our software platforms," Mr Gunthorpe said.

"I actually engaged an Indian development team because we have a close rapport with India in the ag-tech space."

In a recent Ag-Tech delegation to India for the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Mr Gunthorpe met with the two top Dairy companies to discuss the potential of implementing UHF RFID to enhance the management and identification of the herds.

Last year he also had a successful trial in Georgia in eastern Europe, where flocks of sheep are grazed close to the Azerbaijan border and the whole area was unfenced.

"The sheep are shepherded because of the prevalence of wolves and each shepherd has four fairly large dogs to keep the wolves at bay," Mr Gunthorpe said.

"It was quite bizarre but our trial was successful and done under the direction of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) which is supported by the UN.

"They are helping countries with little knowledge about livestock traceability or even the infrastructure to carry out a wide ranging identifiable programs

"I've been helping them and they wanted to use UHF so when they researched the world there was really only a few entities that show up that are really doing this work in the sheep space and that's myself."

However, Mr Gunthorpe did point out that there is work going on in Scotland where ScotEID have been doing some work for a number of years and are making some headway.

"The technology itself has now been used in South America, there is work going on in the US and Canada and in India and parts of Europe are interested," he said.

"And now obviously the big question for us is - now that we have gone mandatory eID - what technology are we going to use?"

He makes the point that the low frequency technology that is likely to be used is thirty years old.

"I equate it to the 2G phone network - there was nothing wrong with it, it worked, but we have got 4G/5G networks now which is technologically advanced," he said.

"And that is what this UHF technology equates to - it is modern and far more technically advanced."

Mr Gunthorpe listed some of the main advantages - longer read ranges, definitely faster reads where hundreds of tags can be read each second, and the tags can be encoded.

"In fact I have an encoding schema that's being proposed formally in some arenas to equate a digital twin of the animal such that when you read that tag you'll know everything about that animal - country of birth, the state, the PIC or property identification number, breeds, genders, year of birth, status like on-farm/off-farm bred, whether it was AI or natural joining, and a unique serial number," he said.

"So when I read that tag I can automatically introduce that animal into the data base without any manual entry.

"Or if it goes from my property to another guys property he can introduce it to his data base in the same manner."

Mr Gunthorpe said that ability to quickly track the movement of animals was one of the criteria's that the FAO and the Georgian team were keenly interested in, when upwards of two million sheep needed to be tracked.

"Their whole management mechanism is different to Australia - in fact the farmers are nothing more than shepherds and twice a year the animals will migrate from the low country to the high country and back again," he said.

"And during that transition is when the government comes in and does all the vetting - drenching, foot bathing, treat them for lice - at that one point in time and they want to record all of these animals through these transactions."

With so many transactions, it was obvious the Georgian authorities didn't have the time to make each manual entry and keep it accurate.

"So anything that make this a hands-free operation is what they needed - identify animals very quickly, and know what the animal is, it just can't be a number, somewhere along they line that number had to be entered into a data base somewhere, with no real difference to the sale yards here" he said.

"And they are very favourable with what we are doing because we had actually met all the specs they were looking for with read times and data collection."

Mr Gunthorpe said the FAO will probably model a system the use of UHF eID sheep tags and they will take that model and move it to other poorer countries around the world

"And that is my point - why wouldn't you take the new technology from the ground up," he said.

"While the low frequency has been around here for quite some time, the population of tags is very low considerably, certainly outside of Victoria and now is the perfect time to look at the newer technology."

In order to reduce the perceived reluctance of uptake, Mr Gunthorpe proposes applying both the low frequency and UHF tags to the sheep.

"We will then have one hundred percent backward compatibility and a one hundred percent forward innovative capability," he said.

"The incremental cost is really quite small because the two tags will pair together with only one application."

Mr Gunthorpe said since 2012, there has been enormous investment in this technology because there has been massive uptake in just about every other industry sector using the UHF technology.

"They are all using UHF for the track and trace of their business processes," he said.

"With that enormous investment, the technology has improved significantly, and the cost driven down.

"In fact we are on our fourth generation tags where the sensitivity has been improved significantly and we are on our second generation readers."

To benefit the sheep industry as a whole, Mr Gunthorpe said the tagging and reading process has to be efficient.

"We are talking about traceability, we are talking about reading tags quickly and in all sorts of environments like the farm, loading on trucks, at sale-yards or abattoirs," he said

"This technology will unravel the big issues of getting stock through the system in real time when we are going from mob based traceability to individuals."

Every individual animal needs to be read and Mr Gunthorpe said using the low frequency tags, every sheep handling process will slow down.

"With this new technology, we can minimise that impact," he said.