EID - Electronic Identification

EID or Electronic Identification enables a animal to be identified (tag read) by the use of a electronic chip inserted into the animals plastic ear tag. In the UK Sheep have had to have EID tags fitted since 2010, the use in cattle is optional. Sheep EID tags have an electronic representation of the official tag number, known as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). This provides a code for the country, the owners/breeders flock number and a sequencial individual number of the animal.

HEXIDECIMAL or ASCII

The number is ofcourse written into the electronic tag in 1's and 0's computer speak. This number may then be read and displayed in various formats, however there are two basic formats, HEXIDECIMAL and ASCII. Hexidecimal or BASE 16 represents the data in its basic form, ASCII in a human readable for. WYSIWYG tags only display the visual number when viewed in ASCII. Thus a typical sheep tag would look as follows

ACSII Representation of WYSIWYG TAG

0826012345600006 = UK 0123456 00006

FarmIT 3000 and EID

Whether you choose to use EID as a management tool or not, FarmIT 3000 has the capability to allow you to make full use of the technologie. This not only includes allowing you to set an EID for an animal but then use this field when importing data from the various EID readers that FarmIT 3000 supports. You may also import data from file (CSV format) and reference the animal using the EID number. Each animal has two EID number fields allowing us to store the EID in acsii and hexidecimal. This is not required with sheep but useful with some cattle situations where on EID reader is in one format and a second EID reader in another. Normally the second EID number is NOT used.

EID and Large Flocks of Sheep

If the thourght of keeping computerised records for 1000's of sheep puts you to sleep or seems an impossible task, then maybe EID is the answer for you. The greatest benifit to EID is the fact that it makes recording on a large scale not only possible by quick and accurate. Handheld EID readers make recording lambing a 15 second job (per ewe) and with a FarmIT 3000 Weigh Crate weighing 300 animals is possible in under an hour. Our largest fully recorded flock (SIGNET breeding records included) is over 3000 individual animals.

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