BIXS Overview

Canadian beef producers have long understood the potential in capturing, exchanging and tracking the specific individual animal data and information made possible through the national animal ID program. The Beef InfoXchange System, or BIXS, leverages that data to benefit producers by improving communications and individual animal information sharing across the entire beef chain.

BIXS is a national voluntary web-based database designed to capture and exchange data linked to an individual animal’s unique electronic ID tag number, known as the CCIA (Canadian Cattle Identification Agency) tag or RFID (radio frequency identification) tag.

BIXS is a tool to assist in the gathering, tracking and exchanging of useful individual animal information across the beef chain. The system enables participants to communicate, build business opportunities and hone marketing programs based on accurate and reliable individual animal data.

BIXS’ query function maintains cow-calf producer confidentiality yet empowers the system so beef supply chain participants can source cattle on specification and creates communication channels across the supply chain based on individual animal information.

The ability to track and share relevant animal production, performance, health, genetic and carcass data will help improve efficiencies at the ranch, feedlot and processing levels. It will also lead to more precise targeting of beef for specific domestic and international market prospects, and increase the overall quality of beef nation-wide.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA) spearheaded the development of BIXS as part of the Canadian Beef Advantage (CBA) program, the branding of Canadian beef for domestic and international markets.

The BIXS is now launched to cow-calf producers across Canada and work continues to enable feedlots to begin submitting animal data to BIXS. The system is designed to work efficiently at high speed and for dial-up users with reliable and higher connective speeds. Those users on slow dial-up are urged to access BIXS through a third party they authorize (third party authorization forms are downloadable from the main page of this website).

Interested producers can register and log on to the BIXS database program via the BIXS website by clicking the ‘Registration’ button. In addition, full instructions on how to register onto BIXS are also provided as a PDF link on the home page of BIXS. Further, links are also provided on websites of organizations partnering with BIXS, like Beef Improvement Opportunities, BeefBooster, Pfizer Animal Health’s Pfizer Gold Program, among others.

BIXS will also platform or partner on an information sharing basis with other industry participants including veterinary pharmaceutical firms, veterinarians, IT firms and more. As these agreements are completed BIXS will provide links to these partners on the BIXS main web site.