Montana Ahead of the Curve With Cow Tracking System by Carol Flaherty MSU economists say the full financial impact of the discovery of Mad Cow disease in one Washington state dairy cow can't be nailed down until proposed legislation becomes stable. Meanwhile, the Montana Beef Network, headquartered at MSU, with its Beef Quality Assurance and optional ID tags that can track individual animals, is getting dozens of calls from producers who want to sign up for part or all of what the network offers. "Our BQA producers get a slight premium on their cattle, but Mad Cow disease has given additional value to becoming Quality Assurance certified or tracking individual animals," says John Paterson, MSU Extension's beef specialist. The Network's optional individual animal tracking system is very similar to the nationwide cattle tracking system that has been proposed since the Washington cow was discovered with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), the formal name for Mad Cow disease. The animal ID system uses electronic tags that allow producers to learn about their animals' meat quality as beef cattle travel through the food network, but it also would have provided a way that the Food and Drug Administration could have used to find all of the cohorts of that single Washington cow. "If those cows in Washington had had the ear tags and the information had been downloaded into the system, it would have taken one phone call to locate all of the cows," says Bill Mies, '67 M, of College Station, Texas. Mies, a vice president of eMerge Interactive, says eMerge and four of its competitors have formed the Beef Industry Exchange, where some database field names have been standardized to allow a single search to find any animal in any of the systems. The eMerge data management service collects information received from radio-frequency ID tags. eMerge is used by the Montana Beef Network. The Network's system of cattle management and tracking was designed to help producers know how their cattle compare to others in the nation, but it can also answer the questions, "Where is that calf? What medications did you give it? Where did it go when you sold it?" says Paterson. MSU grad Sam Phares, '87 AnSci, of Bozeman, already uses the Network's ID tags to track data on individual cattle. "I want to take the calf crop from a big, wide bell curve to a small one" focused on consistent quality, says Phares. Right now, the network is a "great deal," says Lisa Duffey, program coord-inator for Beef Quality Assurance at MSU. The cost to producers is $2 for each tag, while the Network pays $7.25 per animal for data collection and analysis. "Our ID system flows seamlessly into the systems being proposed in Congress," says Duffey. "We don't have individual ranch numbers assigned yet, but our system is set up so we can add that and make it work for Montana. The network consists of a partnership between Montana State University and Montana Stockgrowers Association. In addition, an advisory committee of representatives from Montana's beef industry provides insight to the program's direction.