Immediately recognisable by the ‘red cap’ Caisley tags have been used by livestock farmers across the UK for over 25 years. “Fearing and more recently Ritchey were our distributor in the UK until they were acquired at the end of last year by one of our competitors bringing that relationship to an end,” said Caisley’s CEO Reinhard Nehls, continuing;
“We received many enquiries from British farmers who use and like our tags asking if they could buy them from us, which prompted the decision to set up our UK trading company, Caisley Eartag Limited. Our site for printing and programming the full range of tags, including our Geno tissue sampling tag, is located just outside Ripon, in the heart of beautiful North Yorkshire, and is staffed by a team with a wealth of experience and knowledge of animal identification.”
Caisley’s FLEXOPLUS® and FLEXOTRONIC® generation of tags are used by farmers in over 70 countries around the world. At the company’s manufacturing site in Bocholt, Northern Germany, a programme of continuous development is focused on easy, safe identification for farmers faced with increasing legislative demands to comply with animal identification and traceability.
“Product innovation and quality control are central to everything that we do at Caisley,” said Henrik Winkeler, Caisley Technical Director. The result of this investment can be measured by the outstanding retention of over 99%* with the FLEXO visual, electronic and tissue sampling tag range.
With the challenges of practical farmers very much in mind, the company has developed a number of simple and really practical innovations. To overcome the problem of the frequently confused numbers 1 and 7, 3 and 8, 5 and 6, a unique font was designed. Tags are printed and packed as a strip of four pieces, two tags for one animal, which speeds up tagging and avoids mixing up tags in the field. The universal applicator is another innovation to make animal identification easy for the farmer and safe for the animal. It inserts the complete range of Caisley tags, including EID and tissue sampling, with minimum effort and damage to ear tissue.
The horse meat scandal earlier in the year highlighted the importance of meat traceability for both consumers and farmers and exposed the weakness of traditional visual and even electronic identification. Once the identification tag is separated from the animal, usually at slaughter, the link is lost. Taking a tissue sample at the same time as tagging the animal provides the industry with a simple, low cost, but very robust solution.
Caisley’s FLEXOPlus®GENO tissue sampling tag is the only tag system on the market that takes the sample and safely secures it in the sample tube all in the same action when inserting the tag into the animal’s ear. This eliminates any risk of samples from different animals being mixed up or sample contamination resulting in an incorrect test result. With tissue sampling increasingly becoming the sample method of choice for disease eradication and management programmes such as BVD and TB, famers can have 100% confidence in the sample integrity using a Caisley FLEXOPLUS®GENO tissue sampling tag.
