EUDR screening for cattle and beef importers.
A 2024 survey found zero of 132 surveyed slaughterhouses could show their indirect cattle suppliers weren't tied to illegal deforestation. Here's how EUDR applies to a cattle or beef importer, and what a satellite screen adds on a specific ranch coordinate.
What counts as cattle under EUDR, and what's leaving scope
Annex I's cattle entry covers live cattle, meat, and offal. A delegated act adopted 13 July 2026 removes raw and tanned hides, skins, and leather from EUDR scope entirely, with the change taking legal effect in the second half of 2026, and separately adds frozen cattle tongues to the list from 30 December 2027.
If your business is leather or hides specifically, EUDR is being narrowed to exclude you, not expanded to cover you. This page focuses on live cattle, beef, and offal, the part of the sector that stays firmly in scope regardless of how the leather question resolves.
- Importing live cattle or beef directly from a ranch, slaughterhouse, or exporter at origin makes you the operator: full geolocation, risk assessment, and a Due Diligence Statement per shipment.
- Buying already-cleared beef or offal from another EU trader is the lighter downstream-operator path.
- A "we import only from certified suppliers" claim is a starting point for due diligence, not a substitute for it. EUDR asks for the specific plot behind your specific shipment.
Cattle laundering is documented, deliberate evasion, not just a data gap
A 2024 survey (Radar Verde) of Brazilian supply chains found that zero of 132 surveyed slaughterhouses, and zero of 67 surveyed retailers, could demonstrate that their indirect-supplier cattle weren't connected to illegally deforested land. The mechanism behind this has a name: cattle laundering, where animals are moved through a "clean," compliant-looking ranch shortly before sale, deliberately breaking the paper trail back to where they actually grazed.
This is the sharpest version of a problem every bulk livestock supply chain shares: paperwork describing where an animal came from can be accurate for the last stop and still miss most of its actual history.
What a cattle screening actually shows
Upload your ranch, farm, or slaughterhouse list with coordinates (or names and addresses if that's what you have) and every location is checked for forest-cover change signals since 31 December 2020.
Typical origin countries in this project's cattle research include Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay, but the underlying satellite layers have global coverage, so screening isn't limited to that list.
A screen checks the plot you give it, not the animal's real history
If you give us the coordinates of the ranch actually named on your paperwork, we'll tell you honestly what the satellite record shows there: whether it was cleared after 2020, and how close it sits to protected areas or watercourses. That's real, useful evidence.
What it cannot do is detect that an animal was moved through that ranch briefly after actually grazing somewhere else. Cattle laundering is exactly the kind of fraud that defeats any EU-side check working from paperwork alone, ours included. Closing that gap requires origin-side traceability (individual animal tracking, not just farm-of-record documentation), which is outside what a satellite screen, or any EU-side software, can verify after the fact.
Screen your cattle suppliers
Send us your ranch or slaughterhouse list and get a RED/AMBER/GREEN read back the same day, with before/after imagery for every screenable location. It supports your own Article 10/11 due diligence; it isn't a substitute for it and isn't a Due Diligence Statement.