Radio frequency identification technologies for livestock management and meat supply chain traceability

The need for national livestock surveillance in Pakistan

Ranked amongst the top five milk-producing countries globally, the Pakistan dairy industry can help to overcome food shortage and hunger, alleviate poverty and positively impact economic growth. This influencing role could potentially be more significant while the COVID-19 pandemic severely affects humanity, challenges the economy and increases the risk of global food shortage. However, its large national population of dairy livestock contrasts with Pakistan's top-five ranking, indeed, four to five Pakistani cows produce milk equivalent to one dairy cow of countries with a well-developed dairy industry. Low milk yield per cow negatively impacts the national production and compromises the development of an efficient processing sector, such that consumers are very often forced to use adulterated milk sold by local 'milkmen.' As a consequence, while committed to alleviating global hunger, Pakistan imports in excess of half a million tons of milk and milk-based products annually. Many studies have identified unproductive, inefficient and imprecise management issues combined with poor genetics and imbalanced nutrition as the leading barriers to improvement in the Pakistani dairy livestock sector. At an individual level, lack of awareness, affordability issues, illiteracy and low ambition of a large percentile of dairy farmers creates additional significant barriers. To address low productivity and poor genetics, Pakistani corporate farms and wealthier individual farmers import genetically improved breeds to attain high milk yields. However, they are then faced with the challenge of managing such breeds to attain sustainable and persistent milk yields under Pakistani climatic conditions, often risking excessive culling even to the point of business liquidation. In developed dairy industries, automated sensor-based livestock management systems are now available to help monitor, compute, and optimize procedures in real-time and are proven to increase productivity and profitability. The term precision livestock farming (PLF) is used to describe systems that monitor individual animals or groups of animals to overcome management deficiencies and optimize productivity. My stance in this Opinion Paper is that adopting and utilizing such precision technologies may support Pakistan in raising its livestock resources toward greater productivity, thereby helping to overcome the global food shortage.

Innovative use and efficiency test of subcutaneous transponders for electronic identification of water buffaloes

The objective of this study was to evaluate the viability of using transponders for the electronic identification of water buffaloes and compare their efficiency when used in animals of different age groups. Electronic transponders with RFID technology (2.1 × 12.2 mm) were implanted subcutaneously (D0) in the scutiform cartilage. The animals consisted of four groups: CLF-I (17 calves; 2.1 ± 1.9 months), CLF-II (20 calves; 5.1 ± 3.2 months), HFR (20 heifers; 22 ± 4.7 months) and STR (19 steers; 26.6 ± 6.7 months). The animals were kept under pasture grazing, a part of the year in the dryland and a part in the floodplain, and were monitored for up to 350 days. The average time required for individual transponder implant was 49.46 s, while the time required for reading the code was 3.76 s. The older calves required higher time for individual implant (P = 0.0001) and closer approximation of the reader in the D150 (P = 0.0001). The mean read distance was 2.98 cm in D0 and 1.94 cm in D150. The magnitude of the subcutaneous transponder migration was minimal, and was within an area of 17.2 mm². A slight bleeding was observed in 15.79% of the animals during the implant. A decreasing incidence of edema was observed until D21, with the heifers being more sensitive until that time (P = 0.0099). Considering the results, it is preferred to implant electronic transponders in calves up to two months of age. The physical rate of transponder loss was 1.3% and the loss of functionality was 9.2%. High reading rate was achieved when animals were raised both in dryland (93.9%) and floodplain (97.2%). Thus, the electronic identification of water buffaloes is a technique capable of replacing traditional and rudimentary methods to identify buffaloes and can provide safe identification of animals.

Radio Frequency IDentification for Meat Supply-Chain Digitalisation

Digitalised supply-chain traceability systems can offer wide prospects both for improving safety as well as enhancing perceived quality. However, the coupling between physical goods and information is often difficult for agri-food items. A solution could be the use of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) systems. Due to its wide reading range, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) technology is already widely used in logistics and warehousing, mostly for the identification of batches of items. A growing interest is also emerging in Near Field Communication (NFC), as several smartphones embed an integrated NFC antenna. This paper deals with the automatic identification of meat products at item level, proposing and evaluating the adoption of different RFID technologies. Different UHF and NFC solutions are proposed, which benchmark tag performances in different configurations, including four meat types (fatty beef, lean beef, chicken and pork), by using a specifically designed test bench. As avoiding the application of two different tags could be advantageous, dual frequency devices (UHF and NFC) are also considered. Significant differences in tag performances, which also depend on meat type and packaging, are highlighted. The paper highlights that tag positioning should consider the geometry of the packaging and the relative positioning of tag, meat and reader antenna.

The implementation of cattle market closure strategies to mitigate the foot-and-mouth disease epidemics: A contact modeling approach

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is one of the most endemic diseases in livestock worldwide. The disease occurrence generally results in a huge economic impact. The virus may distribute across countries or even continents along the contact network of animal movements. The present study, therefore, aimed to explore a cattle movement network originated in Tak, a Thailand-Myanmar bordered province and to demonstrate how FMDV spread among the nodes of market, source and destination. Subsequently, we examined the effectiveness of market closure intervention. The market-market (M-M) network was constructed to highlight the inter-market connections and the FMDV was modeled to spread along the trade chain. Four market closure scenarios based on rapidness and duration of implementation were examined. Our results indicate that two of the three major markets located in the province were highly connected and a strongly connected component was identified. The intra-provincial animal movements, which were currently overlooked, should be moved into sights as most of the high-risk sources for FMD epidemics were recognized in a close proximity to the cattle markets. Simultaneously, remote destinations across the country were identified. The inter-provincial animal movement control must be strengthened once FMD outbreak is notified. Based on our simulations, closing markets with low inter-market connectivity may not prevent the spread of FMDV. A selective market closure strategy targeting highly connected markets together with cattle trader tracking system was an alternative approach. However, socio-economic consequences regarding this intervention must be considered.

Integrating strategic and tactical decisions in livestock supply chain using bi-level programming, case study: Iran poultry supply chain

Inventory management has frequently been targeted by researchers as one of the most pivotal problems in supply chain management. With the expansion of research studies on inventory management in supply chains, perishable inventory has been introduced and its fundamental differences from non-perishable inventory have been emphasized. This article presents livestock as a type of inventory that has been less studied in the literature. Differences between different inventory types, affect various levels of strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. In most articles, different levels of decision-making are discussed independently and sequentially. In this paper, not only is the livestock inventory introduced, but also a model has been developed to integrate decisions across different levels of decision-making using bi-level programming. Computational results indicate that the proposed bi-level approach is more efficient than the sequential decision-making approach.