The National Pork Board is handing RFID readers to the people who see the most pig traffic in a year. Swine exhibition sites, state pork associations and Extension programmes holding a current Premises Identification Number (PIN) can apply for up to four handheld RFID tag readers, paid for through a cooperative agreement with the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) Veterinary Services. The goal is the whole point of livestock traceability: read every animal at check-in, record the ID properly, and cut the response time if a foreign animal disease ever turns up in the national herd.
What an 840 tag actually is
The tag at the centre of the scheme is the official 840 electronic identification (EID) ear tag. The 840 prefix is the ISO country code for the United States, and it opens a 15 digit number that is unique worldwide and never reissued. Technically these are low frequency devices. They run at 134.2 kHz and conform to ISO 11784 and ISO 11785, which is the FDX-B and HDX family used for animal identification across most of the world.
That matters, because LF livestock tags behave nothing like the UHF RAIN RFID labels used in retail and logistics. Read range is short, often centimetres rather than metres, and animals are read more or less one at a time. In exchange you get a signal that copes with wet hides, muck and a dozen bodies pressed together in a raceway, which is exactly what a pig show or a cull sow facility serves up. APHIS does approve UHF devices under a separate interim data standard, but for swine the LF 840 tag remains the workhorse.
Handhelds, panels and the check-in queue
Applicants can pick the reader that suits their layout. One option is a handheld that reads both 134.2 kHz RFID tags and printed barcodes, useful where paperwork and tags have to be reconciled at the gate. The other is a longer range RFID-only reader aimed at chute or pen work. Cull sow facilities can go further and request up to five RFID reader panels alongside the handhelds, mounted so that animals are identified simply by walking off the trailer past the antenna. No extra handling step, no separate line to form.
The readers are only half of it. The captured IDs feed into AgView, the pork industry’s disease traceability platform. “840 RFID tags can be integrated into AgView via a new feature called My Barn,” says Brent Pepin, Director of Swine Health at the National Pork Board. Producers are asked to create an AgView account and upload their animals’ 840 tag numbers and premises ID before leaving for a show, so the reader at the other end confirms a record that already exists rather than typing one from scratch.
Fewer clipboards, faster answers
Anyone who has stood at a show check-in with a clipboard knows why this appeals. Reading each animal ID electronically speeds the queue, removes transcription errors, and produces movement documentation that state animal health officials can actually use. Pepin makes the wider case plainly: the technology gives producers confidence that they can track an individual animal and, if it comes to it, help identify where an outbreak started.
That sits under the National Swine Health Strategy and its objective of keeping foreign and emerging animal diseases out of the United States. Subsidised tags and subsidised readers also chip away at the real barrier to electronic ID in the swine sector, which has always been cost rather than enthusiasm. Reader funding runs to 14 September 2026. If an outbreak did occur, quick and accurate swine traceability could reduce both the number of animals affected and the time it takes to draw a line around the problem.
