Cellphones to Track Farm Produce
Japan’s farm ministry will begin a project in fiscal 2005 to create a tracing system enabling consumers to know the “history” of farm products by means of mobile phones, ministry officials said Wednesday. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries plans to complete the system, which will cover half of agricultural products, in three years, they said.
In the planned system, small integrated circuit tags will be attached to agricultural products and information stored on them, such as data on agricultural chemicals used, will be able to be read by mobile phone handsets. In addition to IC tags, which consist of tiny IC chips, the ministry plans to use advanced bar codes capable of storing up to several hundred times more information than existing bar codes. Continue >>