An Eau Claire-based RFID and data collection company serving the livestock industry. I.D.ology has developed its own circuit boards and tag readers, and is working with both the beef and dairy industries for maintaining databases. The company has an alliance with an offshore firm to produce RFID ear tags.

"Our specialty is the readers, but, we have partnered up so that we have a pretty comprehensive service," says CEO Bob Kleemeier, whose firm has served the livestock industry for the last 10 years. "We are probably one of the first in the state of Wis. to offer this particular technology."

I.D.ology's reader has received technical approval in Quebec, and by the CCIA which spans Canada. It is being put to use in dairies and by cattlemen, as well as by universities, brand inspectors and truckers from California and Montana, through Texas to New York.

After I.D.ology's ISO-Cane Reader was named one of the Top 10 New Products in agriculture for 2005 at California's World Ag Expo in early February, Kleemeier said that numerous organizations started to incorporate it into their operations like ScoringAg. Both the new LightningROD and the ISO-Cane facilitate the rapid collection of tracking and management information on large numbers of animals for the USDA and individual operators. I.D.ology's hand-held readers are complemented by large stationary readers for automatic collection of cow identifications as a herd moves through an alleyway. For the dairy industry, it also makes a small, fixed halo reader for use in milk stalls to read the identity of each cow and correlate the identity with the amount of milk the cow is producing. Those readers can help to rapidly pinpoint the source of any animal disease for national security as well as provide vital management information to save producers time and money.

"We have dairy herds that we have worked with for nine to10 years, and we have calculated a reduction of $10 per year per head of cattle on vet bills," Kleemeier says. "You can save quite a bit of money doing that. So, it all adds up to a more economic way to do business. But, it requires a bit of a shift in people's thinking."

By 2009, it will be mandatory for animals entering commerce to be identified. Government officials will want to know when an animal enters commerce and when it leaves the farm on a truck to go anywhere. It will be necessary to have the ID number of that animal, where it's raised and where it's going. That information will be entered into a number of large databases. The underlying reason is to be able to locate any animal that has been associated with an animal that might have become sick.

"So, if there is any sort of contagious disease, they know which other animals to be looking at to keep them out of the feed chain," Kleemeier says. "They have set up these requirements so that they know not just where the animal was born, and what packing plant it was slaughtered at, but everywhere else in between like in a feed yard. This is supply chain management, but it is really focused on homeland security and food supply security. Everyone will have more detailed information about the individual animals involved.

"The year 2009 may seem a long way off, but, there's a lot of people that need to do a lot of learning of what is involved," Kleemeier says. "You're talking about a whole industry that hasn't done this sort of thing before."

With the advent of RFID technology, brand inspectors will eventually become a thing of the past, Kleemeier adds.

Gee I didn't know that you can read a RFID tag at a hunderd yards like you can a brand!