Where's the beef? Mad cow makes case for Optibrand tracking.

• Author: Cada, Chryss
• Position: Hightech Coloradobiz

THE NEWS WAS ALARMING, AND THERE'S NO DOUBT IT helped Optibrand founders promote their livestock-tracking system. A Holstein cow in Mabton, Wash., turned up with mad-cow disease in December, pushing the issue of animal tracking to the red-alert level for everyone connected with the livestock industry, not to mention consumers.

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"We saw a growing interest in food-safety issues and knew there was going to be a need for a way to identify and track individual animals," said Bruce Golden, CEO of Optibrand and one of three Colorado State University professors who founded the Fort Collins-based startup in 1998. "With the positive case of BSE in December, everyone now sees that need." BSE stands for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the scientific name for mad-cow disease.

Colorado is the nation's fourth-leading producer of beef, with annual sales of $2.8 billion. The report of the mad-cow case in Washington prompted 31 countries to ban the importation of U.S. beef, costing the U.S. beef industry tens of millions of dollars.

To prevent animal disease outbreaks, a system that facilitates tracking of individual animals from multiple suppliers is essential.

Golden and his fellow CSU scientists set out to create a livestock tracking system that was more efficient, secure and cost-effective than current methods.

Ear tags presently are the most common way of tracking livestock, but 5 percent to 10 percent of such tags are lost each year. Biometrics, which, like human fingerprints, trace the individual rather than an external device like a tag, are prohibitively expensive and not always easy to administer. For example, high-value cows are sometimes identified using their nose-prints, a time-consuming--not to mention messy--process.

Optibrand's Secure Identity Preservation System scans an animal's eye--specifically its retina--to record its unique retinal vascular pattern. Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) information automatically is encrypted with each animal's image collected. Using Optibrand's scanner, recording a retinal vascular...