Int’l - World leaders join forces in new animal identification venture

Armidale's Agricultural Business Research Institute (ABRI) has signed off on one of the biggest strategic alliances in its history expected to create a major business opportunity through the development and global marketing of a new electronic animal identification tags, matching readers and software. The new tag, expected to revolutionise animal traceability for food safety purposes can transmit up to 100 times the speed of conventional tags at less cost and can store up to 10 A4 pages of information. The strategic alliance between ABRI and PrimaryLinkT, the agricultural business unit of Infineon Technologies Australia Pty Ltd, aims to combine their resources of advanced software and radio frequency identification systems (RFID) was approved by the ABRI Board yesterday. The Letter of Intent was jointly announced in Armidale by ABRI managing director, Dr Arthur Rickards and board member of Infineon Australia and CFO of the Asia Pacific Operations, Dr Klaus Gohlke. Field trials of the 13.56 MHz-based electronic tag with read and write capability are well advanced and it is expected to supersede the current RFID system which is read only. Over the last three years ABRI has invested $2 million to develop new software for breed associations and commercial producers. This software, developed jointly with the International Livestock Resources & Information Centre, is complementary to Infineon's new electronic tag and reader technology. ABRI is the world's leading supplier of software for livestock breeding schemes with its BREEDPLAN International system for beef cattle recording and genetic evaluation now used in 13 countries with databases exceeding 30 million cattle. Infineon Technologies AG, based in Germany, is a top 10 semi-conductor company with over 35,000 employees and over 7 billion EURO in annual revenue. It is also the world's number one security and smart card chip manufacturer and is home to the rapidly expanding RFID product segment. Based on this leading competence, Infineon has created an innovative new global business unit called PrimaryLinkT, based in Melbourne, to develop solutions for the exponentially growing market of livestock identification and data management. Dr Rickards, said food safety was emerging as the number one issue in livestock production. "Livestock producers globally will require access to low cost and functional systems of livestock identification and traceability that underpin supply management and food quality assurance," he said. "This joint project will deliver that outcome in a way that meets the needs of producers, consumers and government agencies." For ABRI, already one of the leading non-Government employers in Armidale, this strategic alliance vindicates its belief that success in international markets is more related to vision, expertise and networking than being based in a capital city, Dr Rickards pointed out. The new tag system and back up technology will be available in 2005.