Advancing Economics, Transforming Lives

September 2008

Nanotechnology Set to Revolutionize Livestock Industry

By Adam Lovgren, Graduate Assistant

The past decade has brought about such a rapid acceleration of global trade in the livestock industry that Paul Thompson, holder of the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, says that it’s just a matter of time before there’s some kind of disease outbreak that precipitates a drastic policy response. So far, the United States has avoided an outbreak, but other countries have not shared our good fortune. In the United Kingdom, livestock farmers were devastated by disease outbreaks. What can livestock farmers do to protect themselves? Thompson is exploring nanotechnology as a possible answer.

Thompson says nanotechnology can provide a much greater degree of traceability in the movement and medical histories of livestock. Though further development is needed, the idea is relatively simple: replacing traditional ear-tag monitoring of livestock with an inserted chip and handheld wireless receivers. Ideally, a chip inserted at birth would record the animal’s movement and rudimentary health information. The chip would be sensitive enough to recognize when it passes through a doorway such as into a sale house, and would record the time and date. The chip would also monitor the bloodstream of the animal and recognize disease indicators. The chip would periodically transmit the animal’s history to handheld devices for record keeping.

Thompson finds the technology interesting, both economically and ethically, because of the large amount of information it would generate about the livestock industry. Currently, nobody knows how often an animal gets sold and moved around.

“Nanotechnology would basically change the nature of the industry,” Thompson says. 
Some farmers worry that sale barns and packing companies might use this information against them. A sale barn might use a blip in an animal’s health history to demand a lower price. However, in the event of a major outbreak, farmers could also use this greater degree of traceability to certify that their animals are healthy.

Currently, no market for disease-free animals exists in the United States, so it’s not clear what incentive a farmer would have to start using the chips. In some European and Japanese markets, traceability is required for market entry, not creating a premium. Thompson believes it is not necessary to create an incentive for traceability but rather to try to remove disincentives. One solution to the disincentive problem would be to make the information gathered by these devices unavailable to sale houses and packing companies.

Another potential for nanotechnology is as a tool for bolstering a process-based claim -- for example, creating a premium for humane products such as cage-free eggs. Traceability is critical for making a process-based claim. If you can’t back up your claim with good record keeping, then you can’t create consumer confidence.

“One of the characteristics of American culture,” Thompson warns, “is that we’ve gotten so used to being at the cutting edge of technology that we just presume that problems that exist elsewhere aren’t going to exist here.”

Whether it’s mad cow disease, bird flu or some other unknown future disease, chances are that one day we are going to have to deal with it here. When that time comes, nanotechnology devices that allow for a greater degree of traceability would be in our best interests.