Patent ID: 7756719

Claim:
A method for tracing the identity of an agricultural product, the method comprising: acquiring data on an agricultural product associated with a harvesting time to form initial data and acquiring container data via a reader for reading a tag associated with a stage; storing the initial data in an initial data storage of a first stage of equipment that is physically separate from a data management system for providing reportable data on a product flow description of the agricultural product; transmitting the initial data to an intermediate data processing system associated with a handler of the agricultural product and another stage, the intermediate data processing system being physically separate from the data management system as a central repository; appending additional data to the initial data received at the intermediate data processing system to form composite data, the additional data including one or more of the following: an originating location, an origination time, an origination date, an origination custodian, an intermediate location, an intermediate time, an intermediate date, an intermediate custodian, a destination location, a destination time, a destination date, and a destination custodian, where the data associated with the agricultural product is cumulatively stored locally in intermediate data storage in the intermediate data processing system until transferred to a last stage, such that the information stored in the data storage of a preceding stage is a subset of the information from one or more later stages; and transmitting the composite data to at least one of a receiver and a reporting data processing system at the last stage for processing the composite data and transferring the processed data to the data management system, wherein the intermediate data processing system is separate from the reporting data processing system such that only the reporting data processing system communicates directly with the data management system via a communications network to report the cumulatively stored information within the composite data to the data management system to support a request for the stored information, and wherein the intermediate data storage is physically and geographically separate from any data storage of the central repository.