One of the Department of Agriculture & Food’s most critical applications is its Cattle Movement Monitoring System (CMMS) which keeps track of the whereabouts of each individual cow in the country.
It is vitally important for food and animal traceability. As Philip O’Reilly points out, only about 10 to 15 per cent of the beef produced here is consumed locally. The rest is exported and is a major source of foreign earnings. ‘That’s why beef assurance is very very critical to us,’ he says. ‘Any doubt cast over the source of beef is very detrimental to us.’
Until 2001, only cattle were monitored in this way. Following the outbreak of foot and mouth disease that year, a sheep monitoring system was put in place that June. Last year a system for monitoring pigs was put in place as part of a disease-eradication program.
The basis of the CMMS is a tagging system. Each cow wears a tag which identifies it and the details are held in the CMMS database. There is a separate database for sheep and for pigs, whose details are recorded on a herd or flock basis, as opposed to cows whose details are recorded individually. The intention over time is to produce a single species monitoring system, said O’Reilly, but he pointed out that there are 7m sheep in this country (greater than the human population) and the sheep-tagging system had to be put in extremely quickly, given the urgency of the requirement two years ago.
Using the database as a starting point, there are ample opportunities to automate several elements of the food production cycle. The sheep-tagging system, for example, uses a web-based application which automates much of the formatting of the tags and does away with multiple keying in of the data contained within them. The production of slaughter dockets for example, which are needed when a cow is presented for slaughter, can be automated and the details held on the department’s database for control and monitoring purposes.
The Department is also starting work on a joint project with the Revenue Commissioners to handle export refund declarations. For goods exported under CAP (the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy) programs, such declarations have to be cleared by both Government bodies. The new project will allow the declarations to be submitted electronically.
Another project under way by the Department, which O’Reilly says is among the most advanced of its kind in all EU member states, is a mapping application which will hold an orthophotographic record of every farm in the country.
The system is based on an aerial photograph digitised and superimposed on an Ordnance Survey map. It will make use of spatial processing, available in the latest Oracle databases, to allow details of all land plots including their size (hectarage), ownership and the use to which they are being put, to be held by the Department. This will be particularly useful in the production of area-aid applications which will become more important as the ‘decoupling’ of payments from food production takes place.
18/11/2003
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