RFID for Animals, Food, & Farming—the Largest Market of All

By Dr Peter Harrop
IDTechEx

RFID for Animals, Food, and Farming will become the largest RFID market of all because it will benefit the food supply chain in a huge number of ways including livestock disease control and merchandising prepared food. This $9.4 billion market in 2017 for RFID systems and tags will also be based on rapid paybacks from improved traceability, condition monitoring, crime reduction and error prevention (for example, as currently used in milk storage in New Zealand). It will be powered by such innovations as RFID tags that do not contain a silicon chip and are therefore one tenth of the cost and Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) - a form of active RFID - that is increasingly affordable for asset control and other uses. There are new advances in signal handling and readers at the favourite frequency HF that increase range by 50-400 percent. However, there is temporary disappointment at some consumer goods and RFID suppliers that cannot persuade certain retailers to share the considerable financial benefits of today’s UHF tagging of pallets and cases and some who suffer technical problems with this approach.