Hometown Security: A Wireless Electronic Monitoring System for Securing Milk from Farm to Processor

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have targeted bulk food contamination as a focus for attention (Holt, 2005). The contamination of bulk food poses a high consequence health threat to our society. Milk transport falls into three of the 17 targeted NIPP (National Infrastructure Protection Plan) sectors including agriculture-food, public health and commercial facilities. Currently, on the typical dairy farm, there is easy and unrestricted access to raw milk storage. Additionally, minimal security safeguards have been developed for bulk milk transport. The current manual methods of securing milk are paper intensive and prone to errors. The bulk milk transportation sector needs a security enhancement that will both reduce recording errors and enable normal transport activities to occur while providing security against unauthorized access. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a wireless security system that will assure the delivery of milk, milk samples, and security information from the dairy farm to the dairy plant. A systems approach will be used to identify the critical points for obtaining multidimensional information: security event; time of occurrence; geographic location; and identity of truck driver. The wireless system will be designed to accommodate the future likelihood that dairy herd information must be transported to the dairy plant with the milk. The system will be designed to operate automatically and require minimal or no attention by the milk truck driver. A demonstration system will be tested in collaboration with two groups of farms and two dairy plants. Project developments will include a milk transport security protocol that is cost effective, compatible with existing milk transport infrastructure, and has the support of the dairy farmers, milk haulers, and processors. The technology will be delivered to the national community by: I) submitting the developed milk transport protocol to commercial dairy companies and milk haulers for review; 2) submitting a consensus milk transport security protocol for an ISO (International Standards Organizations) standard; and 3) presenting the results to a national technical audience. The developed electronic system will be commercialized by presenting it to the collaborating dairy tank manufacturers, sensor manufactures and other interested parties. The milk transport security protocol may be applicable for transport of other bulk foods both nationally and internationally. Successful development of this project will add significantly to the national security infrastructure for bulk food transport.