On-farm trials in the use of UHF (ultra-high frequency) ear tags for the RFID (radio frequency identification) of livestock have provided further demonstration of how suitable this technology can be, especially for use with deer and sheep. Rural IT specialist Rezare Systems ran the trials during October-November, with backing from Deer Industry New Zealand, the Meat Industry Association, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, ANZCO, Landcorp Farming, GS1 and the New Zealand RFID Pathfinder Group.

You can read the full report here.

The trials used UHF tags that are mass produced by an Asian manufacturer although not yet commercially available in this country, and they were conducted on four farms in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Otago. Rezare Systems had assistance also from New Zealand tag manufacturers.

The purpose was to assess the performance of the UHF tags (compatible with the EPCglobal Glass1 Gen2 data standard) in comparison with LF (low frequency) tags of the kind proposed for use with cattle under New Zealand’s National Animal Identification and Tracing system (NAIT). Rezare Systems says the UHF tags had better read performance when used on animals moving through stock races that were 1 metre and 2,5 metres wide in typical on-farm scenarios. Read performance was substantially better when large numbers of animals were moving quickly down the wider race (and in fact, LF tags could not cope at all with this scenario unless a very expensive reader was being used). Rezare Systems says a third scenario, with animals held one-by-one in front of the reader, showed little difference between the performance of UHF or LF.

The trials are intended to help with the development of NAIT, especially as that scheme is rolled out to deer and to farmers who wish to use RFID with sheep. (It will be launched with cattle during 2010-11). Rezare Systems expects to publish a full report on the trial results within the next two months. There is keen interest in the prospects of UHF tags using the EPCglobal standard, with some of that interest coming from Europe where the importance of RFID for livestock identification and traceability is well recognised.