Jointly launched by China's Ministry of Agriculture and China Mobile, the "animal tracing system" combines 2D barcode technology with a high-speed GPRS network to consolidate management and supervision of feeding, epidemic prevention and quarantine of livestock animals from birth to slaughtering.
Livestock workers can use a customized mobile terminal to attach 2D barcode tags to animals, which enables real-time tracing of animals throughout the whole lifecycle. Data is sent via SMS to and from the backend systems of the Ministry of Agriculture.
This allows animal quarantine agencies to analyze and collect critical data related to possible outbreaks of animal disease, which assist the warning, prediction and emergency response processes.