After 23 years of development in cattle EID, the system is now 'ready to go' says its operators – but the Scottish Government will not commit to a roll out.

The industry had been working towards a launch date of the first of January, 2024, when all new-born calves would be identified with an electronic UHF tag. However, with only 13 months until the deadline, confidence that government will meet this date is ebbing away.

Speaking at AgriScot, on Wednesday, Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy and Islands, Mairi Gougeon, told the audience: “Officials are working on it. It is a substantial project and we have a review to do.” Before going on to tell attendees that ‘teams are under unprecedented pressures’ and ‘if we can make that date we will work to do that.’

A cross-industry stakeholder group looking into implementing bovine EID wrote to government calling for the technology to come into place for 2024, however six months after the letter was sent, they have yet to receive a reply.

NFUS president, Martin Kennedy, said: “We don’t feel there is a need for there to be complicated legislative changes. We don’t think it is complicated, we just want people to get on with it.”

A cattle EID seminar at AgriScot, hosted by the Institute of Auctioneers and Appraisers in Scotland, extolled the virtues of the technology and explained the thorough testing which had been conducted.

Bob Yuill, from ScotEID, who has been working on electronic cattle tags since 1999, said: “Fundamentally, we are ready to go. We are recognised as a world leader on UHF technology. We already use a barcode, which is the same as using an electronic chip and passports could be gotten rid of right now.”

Scotland already has 22 livestock markets which have installed UHF readers, plus two in England at Carlisle and Longtown. There are 300 pilot farms already using the technology, with 250,000 'reads' already checked on the system. Aberdeen Northern Marts believe that electronic tags would reduce staff requirements by two and a half people on a busy story sale day.

According to ScotEID, the technology is available for farmers right now to order the pink coloured UHF tags for cattle. Suppliers of the tags quoted by the organisation are, Hauptner Herberholz, Smartrac and APK-ID, but new manufacturers are coming on all the time, so farmers should contact ScotEID if they want to make the switch.

Users will need to buy a UHF reader to use the technology, with costs of between £200 and £700, depending on the level of sophistication required, meanwhile static readers for races cost between £300 and £1500.

The technology will be able to interact with modern existing weigh heads, however low frequency readers and wands will not be compatible. ScotEID explained that the chances of an electronic cattle tag coming out of an animal's ear are similar to industry standards of between 10% 12%.