RFID tags also are considered sturdier and less susceptible to fraud than the plastic, numeric ear tags commonly used now to identify livestock. And because the radio tags or other electronic means can produce detailed information about particular animals, they can help producers of organic or other high-quality beef prove that their meat is worth a higher price.

"The more information you know about the cattle, the more you can get them into the fine retail outlets," said Ken Conway, who directs GeneNet, an alliance of beef producers who use RFID and other high-tech measures to justify higher prices for their high-grade meat.

But while RFID is widely used in countries such as Australia, the technology has been slow to catch on in the United States.

In fact, David Warren, head of Sebastian, Fla.-based eMerge Interactive Inc., which offers RFID-based services to the livestock industry, estimates that the technology is being used on fewer than 2 percent of the nation's livestock.

One huge reason is that the industry, which operates on a low profit margin, is reluctant to embrace costly new technology.

Two Kansas State University professors recently estimated that RFID tags and related equipment could cost owners of small herds close to $25 per head of cattle; in larger herds it would cost less than $4.

But the cost will likely drop further with wider RFID use. In Canada, where the beef industry maintains a centralized cattle database, RFID tags are due to replace by Jan. 1, 2005, the current, time-consuming record-keeping method — bar codes that must be read by handheld scanners.

Julie Stitt, administrator of the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency, estimates that the per-head cost could fall below $2 — "not a whole lot more than bar codes."

Even before the U.S. mad cow scare, the government and industry representatives have been developing the Animal Identification Plan, a nationwide tracking system expected to be implemented over the next three years.

It has not been determined whether RFID or any other technology will be mandatory.

Resistance to the plan has come from meat producers who don't trust the idea of establishing a central database that would allow the government or rivals to know detailed information about their operations.