Tracking Traffic
By Treena Hein
Features Business & Policy TradeProject uses GPS technology to track vehicular traffic, addressing a biosecurity ‘loophole’
For the poultry and livestock industry, GPS technology can provide many
benefits. Veterinarians, government inspectors and service companies
can track vehicle movement, stay in better touch with employees,
determine how vehicles are being driven in terms of speed and other
factors, and route their fleets much more efficiently.
Mapping Potential PIC Executive Director Tim Nelson discusses a project examining the use of GPS technology to track the movement of vehicles on and off farm, in order to speed up the industry’s ability to geographically map the movements of potentially infected vehicles in case of a disease outbreak.
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For the poultry and livestock industry, GPS technology can provide many benefits. Veterinarians, government inspectors and service companies can track vehicle movement, stay in better touch with employees, determine how vehicles are being driven in terms of speed and other factors, and route their fleets much more efficiently.
GPS can also help create reliable, integrated biosecurity protocols that help ensure the effectiveness of co-ordinated efforts to limit the spread of disease.
That’s the rationale behind a current project in southern Ontario. Tim Nelson, Executive Director of the Poultry Industry Council (PIC), says “This GPS trial is one of a number of initiatives being managed by PIC to reduce the risk and minimize the impact of a disease outbreak in our industry.”
Funding for this project was provided in part by Agriculture and Agri-food Canada through the Agriculture Adaptation Council CanAdvance program.
In Nelson’s eyes, the rationale for the project can best be described to poultry producers through a simple thought exercise. “For two weeks keep a tally of every time vehicles (including yours) travel on and off your farm,” he says, noting that most producers already do this as part of On-Farm Food Safety procedures. “Now try and find out where those vehicles have been over the last 14 days. Then try and find out where those same vehicles went after leaving your farm over the next 14 days.”
He adds “Then, multiply this by the number of poultry farms in Canada.”
“By picturing this,” Nelson concludes, “a person can begin to understand the complexity of monitoring vehicle movements on and off poultry farms across the country. If your brain hasn’t exploded doing the above exercise, try and think through how difficult it would be to contact every driver of every vehicle that visited every poultry farm in Canada and get them to recount where they’d come from and where they’d been for 28 days – it makes tracking the sale of dodgy U.S. subprime mortgages all over the world look simple.”
Controlling outbreaks
PIC Executive Director Tim Nelson |
Tracking the movement of vehicles and the people who travel in them is critical in the quest to control a disease outbreak. Nelson notes “It takes roughly 14 days for diseases to show themselves and be identified. So if someone carries a disease onto your farm but they don’t know they’re carrying it, they could have picked it up anytime between one and fourteen days before they came to your place.”
He adds, “Similarly, if you have a disease on your farm, its quite likely you’ll have had it present for as long as 14 days before it shows up, so anyone who visited your farm within that 14 day period could have picked it up.”
The current project stems from other foreign animal disease simulations conducted by the poultry industry some years ago. “We realized that the movement of vehicles on and off farm and industry’s ability to track the subsequent movements of potentially infected vehicles was at best limited and at worst impossible,” observes Nelson.
“We just did the math – it’s almost impossible to do in a hurry, which is what is required in times of disease outbreak,” he says. In looking for solutions to this serious hole in the ‘biosecurity blanket,’ PIC has been managing a trial on the ability of GPS technology to speed up the above process so that in the case of an outbreak, there is the ability to map the potential geographic spread, by farm, of a disease organism.
Nelson says “If it works, we’re hoping all farm service vehicle owners will install GPS (which has other logistical and business benefits anyway), and in time of crisis, make the tracking information available to a central secure location for analysis.”
Details
The company contracted to deliver the project at the ground level is Guelph-based eBiz Professionals Inc. President Ian Richardson says GPS units were installed between November and January on 52 vehicles in eight sectors, including vets, board inspectors, dead-stock collectors and chick delivery. The project finished at the end of March.
Project goals
The goals of the project are two-fold. One is tracking the vehicles in order to determine to locate the vehicle that might have been on an infected farm quickly and accurately.
There was also an outbreak simulation in March. “We will see which farm the implicated vehicle has visited,” says Richardson, “who else has been to that farm, where has the vehicle been afterwards, and see how long it will take us to do this and how accurate we are.” In the meantime, “We can see the data constantly,” he says. “We do check reports to see that everything is working properly.”
“The other goal,” notes Richardson, “is to evaluate economic benefits that will be available to the operators we’re working with.” These operators will have the option of keeping the GPS units (currently being rented through project funds) and using them for their own purposes by purchasing a contract from the GPS company. “BSM Wireless Inc. of Woodbridge is providing them with a favourable price if they want to do that,” says Richardson. “Here is a biosecurity advance that in fact will pay for itself.”
Richardson says project support has been strong. There was some resistance to involvement from drivers in one of the sectors due to privacy concerns, but once the operators were assured the data would be used in a proper way, they were agreeable.
Brian’s Poultry Services Ltd. in Mildmay, Ont., is not involved with this current project, but owner Brian Herman is quick to assert its value. He says, “I’m very confident that GPS is going to become a normal part of business and that this move to new technology is happening rapidly.”
“For a company like mine,” Herman adds, “it allows us to check where vehicles are. Checking the date, time and location of a past job can be used to show what time we arrived, how long we where there and when we left. It also helps with driver safety, since we have a record of how fast our vehicles are driving at all times. Of course it’s good for any company to know the location of all equipment at all times.”
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