Traceability of Beef Production and Industry in France

The French cattle tracing system results from a long evolution, which began in the mid sixties for cattle selection purposes. In addition to its main objective which is cattle tracing and sanitary uses, the system is widely used by many breeder organisations for very different uses: parentage recording, performance recording, herd book keeping, breeding value calculation and animal marketing. The organisation of this system consists on two levels: the breeder organisations level and the level of the national identification database, which is run by the Ministry of Agriculture. The Ministry of Agriculture commits some of the breeder organisations to perform some of the tracing operations: ordering the official eartags, data collection and animal passport printing. The system is designed in order to allow the breeders to provide data only once, independently of their future utilisation as well as to facilitate access to data for other utilisation than cattle tracing. Consequently, the official animal passport gives the official parentage, and electronic data interchange between the information systems of the breeder organisations allows easy access to data of the official tracing system. At the entry of slaughterhouses, the passport corresponding to the identification number of the animal on the eartags is recorded in the local database with the unique number of slaughtering and sent to the national identification database. This number of slaughtering follows all the parts of the carcass, till the pieces of meat.