Tracking and tracing cattle movements with GPS collars

The OTAG project is dedicated to extensive beef production. It has worked on the design of a system that monitors cattles through their environment, via electronic collars in order to manage the spread of diseases and to optimise pasture use, says Dominique Didelot.

The OTAG project (Operational Management and Geodecisional Prototype to Track and Trace AGricultural Production) is an EU Specific Support Action (SSA) which aims to develop a prototype system to track and trace beef production, particularly in the context of Southern Cone Countries and EU policies.

The project has two main objectives: making a geodecisional system operational under the controlled conditions to track and trace the mobility, provenance, and state of beef cattle using emerging geospatial and geocommunication technologies; and to improve innovative mechanisms and methods for recording reliable and accurate data on the origin and primary production of beef, as well as the environmental conditions of the territory where the cattle are based. The prototype includes the use of GPS collars fitted to cattle and information systems based on geodecisional polygons. It has been tested in real conditions at an Embrapa experimental farm in Brazil.

The main challenge is to integrate the different levels of data and functionalities in order to obtain an easy-to-operate user tool. The innovative system is the result of European, Canadian, and Brazilian expertise and relies on a combination of existing operational systems, precision geoinformatic tools and experts and user groups from Southern Cone Countries, Canada, and EU. The system also aims to demonstrate a supporting system for the management of emerging risks in beef production by a combination of an operational prototype, dissemination, information, and communication activities.

Southern Cone countries understand that traceability is a tool that, by means of a suitable identification of the cattle, contributes to the improvement in the information on stocks of cattle and to a useful knowledge on the dynamics of the national livestock, allowing an improvement of the national sanitary system.

In response to the rapidly changing EU market requirement (and recognising the relevance of the EU in the value chain), the restructuring of the Southern Cone countries beef industries is essential. Part of this restructuring is the building of a traceability system. There are three main drivers for the use of traceability: namely to add value through product differentiation and own branding; to comply with international standards that have become mandatory in foreign markets and co-ordination with suppliers to reduce transaction costs.

The studies made during the project are based on in-depth knowledges of extensive beef production context in south cone countries. Beyond the traceability needed for ensuring the sanitary quality of beef chain, implementation of a “tracking and tracing system” could respond to the increasingly important need to have sustainable use of pasture by avoiding soil and natural vegetation degradation , and reassuring European customers of the respect of the environment. These kind of requirements become arguments for the international trade exchanges.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the Brazilian beef production spreads over a large extent of land, including approximately 225 million hectares distributed in 2.2 million properties; with a population of 165 million of animals, according to Anualpec (2006). This is a productive chain responsible for 7.2 million jobs (IBGE, 2003). The bovine meat agribusiness has been growing annually in Brazil on a competitive basis. During the last decade, the medium growth was approximately 30 per cent, while the growth of the exports was higher than 200 per cent. Aiming to meet the requirements of the European Community beef traceability systems, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (MAPA) established the Brazilian System of Identification and Certification of Cattle and Buffaloes (SISBOV). According to SISBOV, it is required for the producer to ensure animal identification and to keep a record of the livestock management. For animal identification, the following devices are allowed: ear tag and brand of fire, ear tag and tattoos, ear tag and button, ear tag and electronic devices – always used in pairs.

However, it is recognised that traceability using electronic devices, readers, and labels, is understood as the safest way for effective tracking and tracing. The computational architecture proposed for the OTAG prototype is organised in four layers. Layer One relates to the data collection from electronic devices in the paddock. The animals have a necklace with a GPS device and the paddock has sensors for automatic collection of weight, vaccination register, and temperature measurement of each animal. The information produced by the electronic devices are sent to a computer located in the farm headquarters. For this task, the open standard XML is used, making it possible for any manufacturers to use the electronic devices. In fact, to define and to improve a standard that can be used by any manufacturer is one of the challenges for the OTAG project.

Layer Two is responsible for storing data, which is sent by the electronic devices and associated with farm management data. The user interface of this layer will allow the farmer to manage data and to extract reports about his cattle production via the Internet. The data of each farm will be sent to Layer Three by using web-service technology. On Layer Three, the information of all the farms of the OTAG system are joined in the same database. Thus, the information concerning to animal movement inside a farm and between farms can be analysed by the use of techniques for dealing with georeferenced information. The last layer is responsible for treating the data from the OTAG database and from external databases – including ground, pastures and climate – and joins them in a specific database to allow geo-decisional analyses.

One of the objectives of the OTAG project is to track the displacement of animals in natural and extended environments. The project has developed a strategy called the ‘individual-based’ approach. One of the most original points of the OTAG system is the fact that GPS positions are periodically and automatically transferred to a base station in order to be collected and used by the management system. Both hardware and software have been developed for the OTAG project to track and trace cattle. The system works via a collar that is placed on every animal, which uses an internal GPS to measure its position with a predefined frequency. Then the GPS data are transferred to a base station. The role of the base station is to collect the GPS data from all collars and make them available to an operator. These two elements communicate with an UHF communication system, and they are using a dedicated communication protocol. The experiment with the collars at the Embrapa Beef Cattle farm created a need to show easily the animal mobility. This led to a web application based on open source tools, integrated with geotechnologies defined in the OTAG Information System Architecture and fully capable of displaying vector, raster, and animal mobility data.

In project OTAG, one of the demands is to identify the contacts between animals, inside of a time period and considering an area for the animal movements. For example, in a case of a foot-and mouth disease (FMD) occurrence the identification of these contacts can help to determine which animals could have some interaction with some contaminated animals. From the current localisation of the contaminated animals, it is possible to manage the action of the sanitary authorities better, as well as isolating better producing regions, to minimise the scattering of the illness. Indeed, FMD is still a challenge for Brazil and other south cone countries. In September 2005, a FMD outbreak occurred in the States of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná, and then, due to emergent risks, many states lost the status of ‘FMD free zone with vaccination’. They were therefore forbidden to export meat to other countries. The economic loss could have reached US$ 1.5 billion, due to commercial restrictions to the main exporters. This highlights the importance of cattle monitoring technology – and, within it, the issue of sanitation – and the major relevance it has to industry and economy.

As a complementary work to OTAG, geospatial tools will be developed to monitor and to avoid new FMD outbreaks. Three Embrapa centres that collaborated in the OTAG project are formulating an internal project proposal, inviting private sector partners to advance the prototype technologies to commercial uptake levels. The ambition is to develop ‘public-private’ partnerships in order to disseminate technological innovations: consequently, OTAG Collar technology developed in France is going to be exported to Brazil and Argentina.

In the R&D field, Procisur together with INTA-Argentine is designing appropriate documentation and detailed descriptions of systems and technologies in order to introduce these into several research programmes for other purposes, such as environmental management of resources. This information will also be shared, through the assistance of Procisur, with the agricultural national research institutes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia.

For further information on the research, contact project coordinator Dominique Didelot at dominique.didelot@cemagref.fr

Published: Wednesday, 10th February 2010 by Tom Freeman

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