Abstract

Taiwan's animal industry has already been transformed from being a traditional small scale farming culture to a capital and technological intensive agro-industrial operation. Facing pressure from imported animal products, Taiwan has already begun to realize its strategy of producing high-quality, healthy and safe animal products to meet consumers' demands. In recent years Taiwan has tried to establish an integrated management system to help raise the overall competitiveness of its animal industry. In 1999, we started to investigate and collect animal farm spatial data creating a GIS farm database, and now more than 80 percent of animal farms have been formally registered on this database. We have achieved good improvements in the area of pollution and disease control. Further more, we also established a monitoring system that can efficiently monitor and control the collection vehicles for perished or diseased animals from farms for cremation. We also created a module for each collection vehicle that consisted of a declaration input device and a weighing system. This module receives integrated real-time positions, loadings and declaration data for perished or diseased animals during the daily operating period for each collection vehicle via the global positioning system (GPS) and the general packet radio service (GPRS). We also have an in situ supervising vehicle that can retrieve and monitor information from the remote server system by GPRS, enabling the monitoring of possible improper usage conducted by the perished or diseased animal collection vehicles. Consequently, FARMNET closely interconnects the delivery information between the collection vehicles, control center, and supervisor on duty, central and local government.