The Kansas Department of Agriculture is now taking cattle branding registration online through a new software program developed by Kelly Registration Systems. This first of its kind program will help manage Kansas’ 16,000 livestock brand registrations.
Historically, brand images have been hand-drawn and have included a 12-digit code, or “brandabetical,” to indicate which symbols made up the brand. A hardbound “brand book” was printed annually to catalog brands.
According to Dr. Justin Smith of the Kansas Department of Agriculture, the previous process took much more time to conduct as it was manually driven. Once submitted, brands were reviewed and approved, or rejected by mail, then payment had to be collected; the entire process could take several weeks to a month to complete. However, with KRS’ brands tool, brand images are uniquely drawn online by dragging and dropping approved symbols across the screen. Brandabeticals are automatically created and matched, thus the time to develop a brand image and associated data is drastically reduced, and all images are consistent. Since it is all managed online, and brands are searchable and updated in real time, paper records are no longer necessary.
States can see potential matches to a requested cattle branding image and make much quicker decisions about approval or denial of a new brand registration. Additionally, submitting registrations online means reduced turnaround time for applicants.
“Kelly’s brand registrations tool has surpassed everything we hoped it would be able to do,” said Smith. “While this tool is immensely helpful for the department staff internally, it ultimately empowers us to quicken the pace of commerce for the cattle business in our state by helping them get to their next step in the process more efficiently. Once we’re up and running with Kelly’s tool, we’ll optimally be able to review brands and complete registrations in significantly less time.
“Kansas had a need for a simpler, quicker process to manage its livestock brands and registrations, and we built a tool that does just that. This tool has relevance for any state that manages livestock brands. The capability is the same whether the tool is used as a standalone product for a group that manages only livestock registrations or as part of a larger state tool for managing licenses and registrations,” said Stuart Edmondson, chief technology officer, Kelly Registration Systems.
