Radio-Frequency Chips Coming to Cattle

Graphic compares passive and active cattle tracking tags; three versions. (AP Graphic) (AP)

These factors are big because human contact and other stresses can hurt a cow's ability to gain or maintain weight. That's costly because beef is, after all, sold by the pound _ and generally with slim profit margins.

"I'm sure hoping and open to other technologies that might be able to solve some of our problems," Owens said.

Even so, he and other people in the industry figure that passive tags will carry the day.

For one thing, passive tags are cheaper, about $2 each versus roughly $10. Passive tags don't require batteries, because they get their power by induction from the electromagnetic energy sent by the reader.

And perhaps most importantly, most of the estimated 5 percent of cattle owners who are using RFID have passive tags. Changing that would be hard, since it's important for all players along the complex chain of cattle ownership to be on the same technical page.

"Despite its warts, I think (passive tagging) is the technology that's going to be brought to play initially," said Dale Blasi, a Kansas State University professor researching the challenges of RFID in cattle. "We're innovative, we'll learn how to work around these issues."

Still, Hassell holds out hope for ZigBeef. While he's not the first to suggest active tags for livestock, he's encouraged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has funded the company with an $80,000 grant. Soon he will be eligible for a $300,000-plus extension.

That makes this a crucial year. He has to attract potential customers while still fine-tuning his system. Part of his pitch is that while active tags cost more, their readers can run as low as $50, instead of hundreds or even thousands of dollars for passive RFID. The active readers' range could be dialed up or down to register multiple cows or just one at a time.

Hassell says his tags' batteries can last five to seven years, well beyond the 15-month life of typical beef cattle. And he asserts that most of the cost of the tags comes from their plastic housing, not their circuitry _ so ZigBeef tags could easily include both passive and active chips, soothing producers' fears about choosing the wrong technology.

There are still other methods for recording that an animal crossed a certain link in the food chain, including retinal scans for identifying cattle. And there are a spate of old-school record-keeping practices, which often rely on brands, veterinary papers or visually spotting numbers on plastic ear tags and writing them down.

Many producers would love to stay that course, fearing the added cost of more detailed tracking. Some also fear that new databases would reveal private business information to rivals, regulators or animal-rights activists.

Meanwhile, pork and poultry producers tend not to have such worries. Pigs are unlikely to need RFID because the nation's 60 million hogs generally remain in large, easily identifiable lots, said Bobby Acord, a former USDA administrator who chairs the Swine Identification Implementation Task Force. Chickens follow a similar pattern _ and are too numerous to tally individually, anyway, with 9 billion in the U.S. alone.