“From the perspective of being able to read every cervid you can get within 10 feet of, we’re there,” says Advanced ID’s president and CEO, Dan Finch. In fact, the company’s 915 MHz tag system, DataTag, is already in use at a number of cervid ranches, as well as at several cattle and pig farms. “However, when you have elk that never come closer than 100 feet, you have to use a stationary reader,” Finch explains.

Advanced ID stationary readers are being piloted to track cervids in New York State, installed near food troughs, water and salt licks (see N.Y. Tests RFID on Domestic Deer). Leach says he may consider stationary readers as a solution in Colorado as well, but also intends to test an active RFID tag system in the coming months to see if the increased read range would improve results. The biggest issue in that case, according to Finch, is the price, which is likely to be considerably higher for active tags. Advanced ID does not currently provide active tag systems, but might do so if it sees significant commercial interest, Finch says.

Advanced ID’s president and CEO, Dan Finch

Leach has been in contact with active RFID manufacturers Cattle Traq and Smart Ag Tag for the next trial, which he hopes to begin within a month. Just how long the read range will be may depend on the terrain, Leach says. However, both companies indicated their stationary interrogators can read up to a mile, while the handheld units vary from 600 feet to a half-mile.

Leach says that during a one-day inventory (part of the passive UHF RFID trial), he was able to read 100 percent of the cervids’ tags at one small ranch, 24 percent at a second and 50 percent at a third. The animals were particularly skittish around those taking the inventory at the second ranch. The initial goal was to test whether UHF tags and readers would have a longer read range than the previously piloted low-frequency system. “They did,” Leach says. “It was a matter of feet, rather than inches.”

Colorado has about 100 cervid ranches, with a total of 6,000 or so captive elk and deer. Animals on small ranches can probably be inventoried by hand, Leach says, but when that is not possible, “electronic tracking is the way to go.” Thus far, he says, he hasn’t found anything better than RFID—though he has considered bar-coded animal tags (which require a clear line of sight between the bar code and the scanner), GPS (which is expensive) and retinal scans (which fail after the animal dies).