Frequently asked questions

LITS is an open standard, and a platform, for national livestock identification and traceability. Each country runs its own registry — the authoritative record of animal identity, movement and health — on its own government domain, and any vendor can integrate on the same open API.

No. LITS is the standard; software vendors build products on it. The national registry is operated for the State, and farmers and vendors connect to it as clients on equal terms.

The government. The operator runs the platform on the State's instructions and never owns the herd data or the mandate.

The API contract, examples and conformance suite are open under Apache-2.0, and the documentation under CC BY 4.0. The reference implementation that runs a national registry is source-available and licensed separately.

Those are established national systems in Namibia, Botswana and Australia. LITS is the same proven idea, published as an open, vendor-neutral standard so each African nation can run its own — on its own domain, without lock-in — and designed to interoperate with systems like these, not replace them.

The law. A system becomes the official, mandatory record when a statutory instrument designates it under animal-health law. Everything before that is voluntary.

Yes. Residency runs from a shared platform to a dedicated cluster, an in-country silo, or a fully State-hosted, air-gapped deployment. The standard is the same at every rung.

You can. Escrow, full data export in the open format, and the right to take operations in-house mean a nation is never locked to one supplier.

No software does. Market access is granted to a country or zone by the EU and depends on animal-health status. A registry builds the evidence base any future application relies on — it does not replace the veterinary programme.

Yes. Every vendor uses its own per-operator key on the same open contract. FuroTrack is the reference client, not a privileged one.

Build against the published OpenAPI contract in the sandbox with test keys, run in dry-run, pass conformance, then receive a live per-operator key.

No. The contract is path-versioned and additive within a version; breaking changes only ship under a new version, and every change is recorded in a public changelog.

No. You can register animals, move them with a permit and request certificates directly from a phone. A vendor app uses the same record underneath.

Your keeper identity, animals and certificates move with you, and your animals' national IDs never change.

Nothing. Anyone can scan the QR and confirm a certificate against the registry, free and with no login.