Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) is an initiative requiring labeling of beef, pork, lamb, fish, and peanuts according to the country in which the commodity was born, raised and harvested. COOL is presently a voluntary practice. However, it will be mandatory for the above commodities sold at the retail level by September 30, 2004. Maverick Ranch is working hard to achieve compliance to this law, and was recently recognized by Meat Processing Magazine for its innovative efforts. The complete article follows.

KEEPING COOL:
Maverick Ranch Makes Country-Of-Origin Labeling Work.

"Like it or not, country-of-origin labeling - COOL - is going to be the law of the land. An element of the 2002 Farm Bill signed by President Bush, the controversial law will require all meat sourced outside the United States to be labeled as such in retail packages in U.S. stores. (COOL is not required in foodservice products.) It is expected to take effect later this year, after final hearings and tweaking by USDA.

   "'It's a bad law, it's a poorly written law, and it won't accomplish what its supporters want it to accomplish,' comments Rex Moore, president and COO of Maverick Ranch, the Denver, Colo.-based packer and processor. 'But it's the law, and we have to abide by it. We have to be ready.'

   "While other members of the U.S. beef industry continue to dither and fret over a law they don't like and don't want to follow, Maverick has taken the bull by the horns, so to speak, and begun instituting one of the most sophisticated animal traceback programs in the world in order to comply. The irony is that Maverick doesn't actually source any of the cattle it processes from outside the United States, but if it did it would have no trouble at all identifying the source-ranch, not to mention county, parish, province, territory, and/or country, of every animal that becomes meat for Maverick. In any event, its program will allow the company to state, officially and without qualification, on USDA-approved product labels, that Maverick meat comes from cattle 'born and raised in the USA.' Typically, Maverick, a company that manages its enterprise in the spirit of its name, has figured out a way to build on a complex and even politically volatile situation to not only create a business advantage but an information advantage as well. (See "Contaminants Can't Hide in This Lab," Meat Processing, August 2002, p.12.)

   "'We began working with a company called IdentityPreserved.com about 10-12 months ago, using them to help us write our process-verification program for USDA,' says Rex. 'They developed the system to track all the Starlink GMO corn in the country, so we thought they could help us with cattle.' Maverick is also working with two Ft. Collins, Colo., companies, Optibrand and Research Management Systems USA (RMS), on other elements of the trace-back program.

   "The Maverick system works like this. In the spring when calves are born, each calf is given a retinal scan with a hand-held Optibrand device, and thus the animal automatically enters Maverick's database. Not only that, but the scanner is linked with global positioning system tracking, so that Maverick knows exactly where the retinal scan was made. More scans are made at different points of the animal's life: shortly after birth, when the animal is first weighed at the feedlot, at a mid-point in the feedlot, and again at the packinghouse. The tracking software comes from RMS, a company that has developed a national identification program for the cattle industries in both the United States and Canada.

   "The linked program provides Maverick with more information than simply the whereabouts of every animal it will eventually bring to the plant. The company can track sire and genetic information, yield and grade, and just about anything else it wants to know about an individual animal's life, parentage, ownership, movement, or content. 'We will be fabbing carcasses in small groups, 12-50 head, and each group will get a lot number, which will go on to the boxes of beef from that group,' describes Rex. 'The store can track, through that lot number, the source of the beef right back to the ranch. And so can we, of course.'

   "In fact, so can producers. Indeed, the Maverick traceback program makes available origin and traceback data to anyone with entry into a password-protected area of the Maverick website. IdentityPreserved.com provides two products, IP Track and IP Audit, to this end. The first is an online application that centralizes information from several different sources, including the retinal scans and RMS's tracking; this is the data compiled on the website. IP Track offers tracking according to several criteria, including inherited attributes, tested characteristics, treatment during production and handling, and degree of identity preservation. IP Audit compiles the data for third-party audits - in the case of Maverick, for USDA. 'It's a pretty good deal when you can come up with a system that, through USDA's Process Verification Program, makes USDA your third-party auditor for country-of-origin labeling, too,' notes Rex with a smile.

   "The RMS identity system was originally developed for cattle producers in Canada, who moved more quickly than U.S. producers toward accepting a national traceback program. Up north, beef, bison, and dairy cows are all origin- and-ownership-documented through the Canadian Cattle Identification System (CCIS), which has the same infrastructure as the system, CattleTrust National ID, RMS licenses for use in the United States. CCIS still uses ear-tag data embedded in a bar-code rather than retinal scans, but the deliery and management of the data are the same: Once the individual animal's number and data, which remain unique to the animal throughout its life, are read by a scanner, the data travel electronically to the CCIS database. The animal's movements through markets are tracked, and if for some reason it dies before reaching slaughter, its number is noted and retired by Canadian authorities. Normally, of course, the animal makes it to the packinghouse, and here the data are read and recorded again, and then after slaughter the number is retired. Presently there are 22 million individual animal IDs registered in RMS's Canadian program. Its success encouraged RMS to take the program a step further; the extension, which collects and tracks detailed production and carcass information, is called Cattle DataNetwork.

   "At Maverick, the RMS system is used in much the same way as in Canada, except on a smaller scale and including data of special interest to Maverick. As a processor of USDA-certified organic beef, the company must ensure that at no time in a beef animal's life was it given hormones or antibiotics or was fed anything but certified-organic feed. Its extensive traceback program allows Maverick to compile all the necessary data and documentation to meet the requirements of USDA's Process-Verification Program, the Organic Standards Act, and country-of-origin labeling. It may be the only beef company in the world that can meet the documentation requirements of all three programs with a single traceback system.

   "Maverick isn't the only U.S. beef company to use the RMS program as a component of a traceback and/or cattle- management program. Nolan Ryan Tender Aged Beef, among a few other programs, also uses RMS to process verify cattle. And it's no surprise that Maverick and other processors of organic beef are well ahead of the rest of the industry in terms of traceback development. 'I'm working with, let's call them more progressive producers,' says Rex. 'The producers indemnify me, and I indemnify my customers.'

   "What's truly unique about Maverick's program, however, is how the company has arranged the data and information to apply to COOL. 'We've tried to turn a negative into a positive. Personally, I think the COOL law, as it's written, is too complicated to do anything else but create a system for certifying the origin of U.S. cattle,' comments the beef executive. 'And the big companies, when they say COOL's going to cost them $40 or $50 a head, that doesn't surprise me.' Rex won't say how much the Maverick program costs, though he points out, 'I can tell you it's less than those figures I just mentioned. I think the smaller companies are going to benefit the most from COOL, if you can call it a benefit. They're in a much better position than the big companies.' The lines of communication with producers tend to be shorter and clearer for small companies, he says, and small outfits can maneuver more easily, responding to market and regulatory changes.

   "Rather than fight a law he doesn't necessarily agree with, Moore recognized early on that the battle was lost, and spent his energy figuring out how to make the change work for Maverick. He concludes: 'There's no question that animal identification is here to stay, no matter if the COOL law remains as it is written or not. Just the other day Tom Ridge, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, said he wants a national ID program for livestock. If he's talking about it, you know it's not going away.' Mp"

Reprinted with permission from Meat Processing, May 2003 issue. For a printed copy of this article, e-mail us at info@maverickranch.com.