Monitoring food safety with an Aquasoft system

The company Aquasoft has developed a unique system enabling detailed monitoring of every livestock animal in the Czech Republic. The system, known as the Integrated Agricultural Register, has recently been put into full operation.

The European Union considers the Integrated Agricultural Register (IAR) one of the best systems of its kind in any of the countries of the EU. Aquasoft developed the system for the Ministry of Agriculture, which is responsible for monitoring the pertinent hygiene measures associated with meat and foodstuffs. In accordance with the valid legislation of the Czech Republic and related EU laws, all livestock animals must be centrally registered. This relates to their existence, movement (such as sale or purchase), reproduction, castration and final slaughtering or inclusion in the food chain.

“The aim of the IAR project was to design and implement an information system providing comprehensive coverage of the central recording of livestock and accompanying agendas,” says Petr Franc, Managing Director of Aquasoft. In his words, the IAR significantly facilitates the continual monitoring of millions of individual animals, which in practice means the detailed tracking of each individual cow, sheep and goat. “The system records details on around 60,000 active breeders, around 60,000 premises, around 1,500,000 live cattle and hundreds of thousands of other animals,” adds Franc. He also notes that the system processes more than 15,000 pieces of information about individual movements of livestock every day and, no less importantly, is also responsible for issuing and administering accompanying documents for cattle – i.e. unique identification documents for each animal.

The data in the IAR is used in two principal areas. From the economic viewpoint it serves as one of the most important sources of information for assessing applications for agricultural subsidies. The second area is food safety. Should an infection be discovered, the system enables the unambiguous identification of animals that have come into contact with an infected animal. This system function is used, for example, in cases in which bird flu or BSE are discovered.

In addition to record keeping, the system also has an active interface known as the farmer’s portal, which allows farmers access to electronic output that until now they have received only in printed form. “Information in electronic form is easier for farmers to process and provides more-detailed information that cannot be provided by post. Another advantage of the new portal is the opportunity of sending data directly to an accredited person without the need for sending forms on paper,” says Petr Franc. He adds that only farmers with specific commercial software have been able to do this previously. Not least, the portal also allows searches for data of various kinds, including calculations of breeding intensity used in granting agricultural subsidies.