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HONOLULU — A technology used to track everything from cattle and bottles of Viagra to U.S. military weapons will soon be tested on an unlikely candidate for surveillance: tomatoes.

The Hawaii Department of Agriculture will roll out a three-year pilot project this month to track and trace tomatoes and other produce using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The system uses microchips with paper-thin antennae stuck onto produce boxes that emit radio waves when scanned.

While the technology is already being used by a few supermarkets and farms across the nation, Hawaii would be the first state to test RFID from farm to market in hopes of improving food safety.

Sandra Lee Kunimoto, chairwoman of the Hawaii Board of Agriculture, said the ability to determine where food comes from and where it has been distributed will become even more important as the food supply continues to be globalized.

In the event of a recall, the state wants to be able to trace a product to the farm of origin and identify where inventories were sent — all within a few minutes.

The state said the system will also help improve quality and freshness as well as create a database of all produce being shipped and sold.

Four farms across Hawaii — ranging from a small farm on the Big Island to a 2,000-acre multi-crop operation on Oahu — will soon tag boxes and pallets of everything from lettuce to strawberries.

John Ryan, administrator for the program at the state Agriculture Department, said he hopes costs will eventually come down to a point where RFID would be adopted by many of the 5,000 farms in Hawaii, and beyond.

“Our goal here really is to develop a model that hopefully many other states can use,” he said.

Ryan said the possibilities combining RFID and produce are almost limitless.

Individual fruits and vegetables could one day be tagged with tiny RFID labels with ID numbers that would allow consumers to access information through the state’s online database.

They could determine what pesticides were used on their Maui pineapple or verify their pricey Kona coffee beans were actually from the Big Island. They could also find out when their mangoes from Oahu’s North Shore were harvested and how long they have been on the shelf.

The state is partnering with Motorola Inc., Lowry Computer Products Inc. and GlobeRanger Inc. The state is also working with the University of Hawaii to develop bio-sensors that could test for contaminants, such as E. coli and salmonella.

Joe White, a vice president in Motorola’s RFID division in Maryland, said there was growing interest worldwide, especially from Europe and Asia, in tracking produce.

With RFID, “I know who touched it, when they touched it and where it went throughout the whole supply chain,” he said.

The technology dates to World War II, when Britain put transponders in Allied aircraft to help radar crews distinguish them from German fighters. In 2003, the U.S. Department of Defense and Wal-Mart mandated that suppliers radio tag all crates and cartons, giving RFID a major boost.

Katherine Albrecht, co-author of “Spychips” and founder of CASPIAN, an anti-RFID group, said she’s not against using RFID to track produce in bulk.

However, the possibility of tagging individual fruits and vegetables raises serious consumer privacy issues.

“It’s crossing the line in the sand. Once you begin seeing them appear on individual consumer items, you open up a whole Pandora’s Box to track individuals,” she said.

She also expressed concerns about the possibilty of the label being accidentally consumed and having a state project that supports and advances RFID technlogy.

The state says it’s all an effort to improve food safety standards, not to track people or eating habits.

In March 2007, eight people in Hawaii were sickened with E. coli after consuming contaminated lettuce. It took months for health officials to pinpoint the source, which was a Kauai farm that had been flooded by stormwater runoff from a nearby cattle pasture.

An E. coli outbreak in 2006 killed three people and sickened hundreds nationwide before the bacteria was traced back to contaminated spinach from Central California.

“During that time lapse, you’ve exposed the industry,” Ryan said. “Everybody is taking losses in the supply chain, not just the guilty farm.”

Letitia Uyehara of Armstrong Produce, a partner in the state project and one of the largest produce distributors in Hawaii, said the spinach industry has still not recovered.

“Now there’s a big push to be able to trace back the contaminated stuff,” she said.

Uyehara said RFID will also help Armstrong with efficiency and inventory controls. The thousands of boxes that arrive at Armstrong Produce daily from farms across the world are now manually tagged by hand with bar code stickers and individually scanned.

With RFID, portals can automatically read entire pallets of produce, tagged by farmers, as they are loaded and unloaded at Armstrong’s gates.

Uyehara said RFID wasn’t been adopted by the food industry earlier because of cost.

In its trial, the state is supplying the RFID labels, which currently cost about 17 cents apiece and handheld readers that run nearly $3,000 each.

If the program is successful, farmers would be the ones that would likely have to absorb the costs of the tags and readers, cutting into their slim profits. But they may be forced into adopting RFID if distributors and retailers start demanding it.

Ryan predicts the cost of the passive tags eventually will drop to a few pennies. He is in discussions with AT&T and Motorola to develop a low-cost wireless phone equipped with an RFID reader.

“When it gets to that point, I’ll have a high level of adoption,” he said.

But he’s already recieved strong interest.

“I’ve got more farms volunteering than we can handle,” Ryan said.

Alan Takemoto, executive director of the 1,600-member Hawaii Farm Bureau, said the state’s project will help determine if RFID would be economically feasible for farmers.

Takemoto said the ability to use high technology to trace foods adds great value to premium products grown in Hawaii.

One of the state’s primary concerns about using RFID on produce is accuracy. RFID tags can be read through almost anything, except water and metal. Tomatoes and other produce that are primarily water could absorb the electromagnetic signals.

To prevent misreadings, pallets will be tagged in addition to individual boxes.

The state, which is planning a mock recall in June, has recieved $500,000 in grants so far and is seeking an additional $1.1 million to complete the three-year program.