A third advantage is improved food safety: the system aims to mitigate the effects of--if not eliminate entirely--the kinds of mad-cow and E. coli incidents that make Frank Perdue a richer man. "If there is a scare, the system provides a mechanism to trace products that have been contaminated, which avoids the destruction of uncontaminated products and minimizes losses," says Lee Curkendall, vice-president of product development at AgInfoLink, the new systems integrator that is acting as sherpa through this high-tech terrain for several alliances. "Participants in the chain can also adjust their environmental and management practices to reduce possible contaminants." If, for example, a packing plant discovers a chemical residue in certain calves, it can notify the supplier, who can comb through those animals' histories looking for common strands or anomalies. Perhaps they all hail from a particular pasture where pesticides have been incorrectly applied.
At the back of everyone's mind, of course, is the hope that source verification and performance-data tracking in the beef industry will bring carnivores who have defected to paler products back to their rib eyes--meaning more money for all. "We're not just losing market share to pork and chicken; we're also losing it to people not buying meat," says Bob Nunley, the owner of Coyote Ranch, in Sabinal, Tex., and a member of Rancher's Renaissance, another alliance that is experimenting with the technology. "Someone goes to a store and spends a lot of money on a steak and it's too tough to eat--we've lost a customer."
In Nunley's vision, alliances that could track their beef and thus guarantee its quality would trumpet the fact through labeling: consumers would grow to associate a divinely marbled rump roast with Rancher's Renaissance, for instance, and gladly pay more for it. "Right now, nobody knows whose meat they're buying," says the rancher. "We need to be able to differentiate the product--to show we're a group of people producing quality stuff."
Coyote Ranch looks anything but high tech: a handful of ramshackle buildings surrounded by 9,000 acres of mesquite, agorita berries, and guajillo. But if Schwertner's outfit is the Spirit of St. Louis--the earliest of adopters using the most basic of technologies--then Nunley's is the Concorde. The ranch is serving as a test site for a sophisticated implementation of the technology that may ultimately become the prototype for a national cattle-tracking system. (See "Equal-Opportunity Beef," below.)
Rancher's Renaissance--a 20-company alliance with members in Hawaii, California, and Texas--chose Coyote Ranch as its beta site because of Nunley's familiarity with computers: the lean, laconic rancher does programming as a hobby and developed most of the business's inventory software. Charged with testing the data-collection aspects of the system prior to the establishment of an alliancewide database, Nunley began putting ear tags on his cattle last October. But the use of tags is where Nunley's and Schwertner's systems part company.
In the Rancher's Renaissance system, which should be fully deployed in March, there will be little keying of information into a laptop. Rather, sophisticated software will handle nearly everything. To start, Nunley will log on to the computer and select which bovine characteristics he wants the software to recognize--whether or not a cow is pregnant, for example. He will then take a "work card"--a 10-by-30-inch piece of plastic embedded with several transponders--that is dedicated to that particular characteristic and place a label indicating a possible outcome ("yes," for pregnant; "no," for not pregnant, recheck) next to each transponder. The person working the chute can then simply scan an animal's ear tag and point his wand at the appropriate transponder on the card: the joyful tidings that #431B is with calf will travel via radio frequency to the computer, which may be 800 feet away in the cab of a pickup truck. Nunley also plans to set default results ahead of time, so that if all the calves passing through his chute come from one place or are undergoing the same treatment, that information will be automatically registered for each one. "The point is to save these guys from having to do a whole lot of data entry out in the field," says Curkendall. "They're cow punchers, not key punchers."
Once the proprietary software running on the computer has stored the data, the ranch will transfer a copy of it over the Internet to a Structured Query Language database running at a nonprofit technology provider to the industry. Using a password, members of the alliance will be able to access that database--also over the Internet--and run queries against individual ID numbers to see how their animals performed at different stages. They will also be able to pull reports comparing that performance with various averages (for example, how did the tenderness of my animals compare with all others processed by this packer?).
Members of Rancher's Renaissance are deploying the system with the guidance not only of AgInfoLink but also AgriInitiatives, a two-year-old consultancy to the agriculture and natural-resources industries, in Austin. (The companies are also working with Beef Advantage.) Anne Anderson is the CEO of both: she, Curkendall, and another partner devised the model for the source-verification and performance-data-tracking system and founded AgInfoLink when they couldn't find an existing technology company that could handle all the pieces.
What both companies aim to do, Anderson says, is to get all the players in the supply chain to focus on creating the best product for the end consumer, rather than simply passing off material to the next link. "We in the cattle industry have unfortunately had a somewhat cannibalistic relationship, with buyers and sellers making money at the expense of each other," she says. "We have to realize that we're all in the food business; we're all part of the same manufacturing process."
