New York’s Department of Agriculture and Markets will being this month a pilot program testing UHF RFID tags on the state’s domestic deer and elk (cervids). The ultimate goal is to track the cervid population and better trace diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD). The program will use a 915 MHz radio frequency identification system provided by Advanced ID Corp. that allows deer and elk tags to be read from as far away as 2 meters (up to 8 feet).

New York has about 400 cervid farms, with a total of 10,000 deer and elk. The state requires that all cervid farmers inventory their herds annually, which can be done by means of a simple head count at small farms, or by visual numeric tags or bar codes. The latter can fade in sunlight and get dirty, however, which makes them hard to read with a bar code scanner, according to Barry Bennett, president and CEO of Advanced ID, a Calgary, Alberta, provider of RFID systems for the animal industry. RFID reportedly provides a faster and more accurate read.

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Source: RFID Journal, Claire Swedberg
May 31, 2005

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