Brian:  With over 5.2 million head of cattle in Oklahoma, and the increasing trend of portable technology, many are jumping on the bandwagon to be the first to create a user-friendly identification system.
John Hassell:  Well the current tag can read, currently about, oh, at most, this distance.  The ZigBeef tags, we can have a reader in our hand and be able to read animals that are nearly to this barn.
Brian:  John Hassell is the owner and creator of ZigBeef, a long range radio identification tag for cattle; and is just one of several technologies developed to track animals throughout their life.
David Lalman:  There is more and more marketing programs that provide a premium in the market for cattle that are age and source verified.
Brian:  OSU extension beef cattle specialist, David Lalman, says the ID system allows producers to obtain information from the animal’s history to its medical background; all of which are important when competing in a global market.
Lalman:  If we can put our best foot forward, here in the U S, and show clearly that we know exactly where all of these animals came from.
Brian:  It will make our meat more marketable.  Currently Oklahoma ranks 3rd in the number of cattle operations, yet a recent study for voluntary premise registration shows Oklahoma ranked 41st in the nation.  Now out of a possible 71,000 operations, only a little over 5,000 have actually registered; an indication of just how hesitant some producers are with this new technology.  
Jake Nelson:  You might be able to trace that specific bacteria back to a farm or a ranch or a feedlot, all the way to an individual animal perhaps, or producer; and there is a lot of fear among people in the system that it could be misused, and that’s understandable.
Brian:  Jake Nelson, a meat-processing specialist with the Oklahoma Food and Agricultural Products Center, says despite producer fear, if the ID system is used properly, it could benefit the entire industry by reducing the size of recalls.
Nelson:  One day’s production is thousands and thousands of pounds of product.  So having an ID system that further segmented those lots, or those batches, or those production runs, sure could minimize recall amounts of product.
Brian:  Meaning a safer product on the shelf, that not only saves the processor money, but gives a premium to the producers willing to stay on the cutting edge of technology.