You have read, in this space among many others, of the sinister nature of genetic modification and the patenting of seeds. I have ranted endlessly about the dangers of the food system being in the hands of just a few corporate land barons. No reason to stop now.
For about five years now the USDA and many large corporate interests have been pushing a program called the National Animal Identification System. NAIS is touted as an effective tool in battling the spread of livestock diseases such as cattle tuberculosis and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow. It provides methods for tagging livestock of any kind with RFID, the same sort of microchip that many people have put on their pets in hopes of recovering poor Fido if he ever gets lost. The thinking is that if a side of beef in a Greeley, Colorado meatpacking plant tests positive for mad cow, authorities can quickly and easily identify said cow, trace it back through the system, and discover other animals with which it may have made contact.
Currently, at the federal level, NAIS is a voluntary program overseen by the USDA and administered by the several states with help from organizations like the Future Farmers of America and the Farm Bureau. Farms, feedlots, and confined animal feeding operations apply for and receive a formal numerical designation that is then applied to microchips injected into or ear-tagged onto each animal. According to the USDA, in 2007 the state of Iowa went from 11,000 registered sites to more than 20,000, an increase of over 80 percent. All this despite a lack of any sort of government funding to participants for the program. Farmers must buy in if they choose to participate.
Setting aside for the moment that this system feels like a perfect bureaucratic method for closing the barn doors after the mad cows get out, all this seems fairly innocuous until we look a little deeper. The state of Texas has recently passed legislation requiring NAIS tagging for all dairy cattle. It goes into effect March 31. Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia and Tennessee now require participation for goats and sheep. In Michigan, farmer and now reluctant revolutionary Greg Niewendorp has endured visits from the sheriff reminiscent of scenes from and old Billy Jack movie.
The voluntary system is becoming perversely mandatory in many other states as well. In Colorado, according to Judith McGeary, Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, two families who refused to register their properties were kicked out of the state fair. In Idaho, the state included a NAIS premises registration form in the packets for registering one's brand (which has to be done every 5 years). The form was not clearly marked, and appeared to be simply part of the required brand documents. In Tennessee and North Carolina, where drought has made hay assistance necessary, you can't get any unless you register your property.
This has induced howls of outrage from a growing and vocal group of opponents, notably FarmAndRanchFreedom.org and NoNAIS.org, bringing together an odd-bedfellow mix of left-wing radicals and libertarian property-rights activists. They both feel that while such draconian measures may be necessary for an industrial food system that causes the very illnesses it now seems to need to track down, such procedures are overly-invasive, perhaps even Orwellian, for small family farms. The government is saying NAIS is voluntary while subsidiaries are making it mandatory. One needn't register one's guns, but goats are another matter. Seems we've met Big Brother, and he is us.
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Comments: 18
It all comes down to motives and control ... running amok when fear and greed enter too deeply ...
I'd say go to those links above and poke around there. Those folks got it goin' on as far as activism on the issue is concerned.
Never let anyone, least of all the government, keep you from a good steak.
To me, this seems like another government panacea that will not help make our food supply any safer! Until people start DEMANDING organic foods (including meat), I count on the government to come up with all sorts of ineffectual schemes.
I'm stopping here before I get accused of spitting fire & brimstone and get told to back off. USDA's corporate favoritism enrages me and there's nothing any ONE individual can do about it.
It is getting rightdown scary to know if any of our food is safe to eat unless you know the farmer down the road.... I hope to see more CSA farms all over the country and maybe Big Agri-Business will get the hint............ NAW, it is too obvious and simple!
My friend complained about having nightmares last night. Jokingly I said - don't blame my cooking! He said I have nightmares every time you cook cheap beef. (chuck roast $1.69 lb on sale) I have to make my money stretch, but if he is having nightmares, what else is it doing to him? So, we're going to eat less meat, but of much better quality and - of course - more expensive. That's short term. Long term - who knows what we'll save in health costs? Thanks Kurt - I need this push!
I am really against cloning, at least very much of it in certain areas, and GMO, or hormones and even antibiotics. This seems not so problematic, unless we have to eat them too and get tracked as we digest the food! ;-)
If it were to remain voluntary it would be less sinister. The moves happening in many states that mandate compliance forces more small farms out of business, put more of the food supply in the control of a minute number of people, and literally forces farmers to register their property and install tracking devices on their farms.
The answer to mad cow is simple - don't feed meat to cows. Meanwhile smaller, organic and free range farms, and lots more of them, make healthier animals. Would it be more expensive? Sure, for the steak. But the savings to in our health system, etc., would be enormous. One must always look at the hidden costs of cheap food.
So do I!
Obviously the industrial food-production system needs this sort of tracking, which could be helpful in situations like the one with Topps Meat, which recalled over 20 million pounds of hamburger meat because of an e coli contamination, but refused to name their suppliers. Of course that would only work if the tracking continued after the animal was slaughtered.
But I don't see the justification for forcing small farmers and livestock owners to do it. This looks like an attempt to tip the scales even more in favor of large-scale corporate farms, making it harder for smaller operations to survive.
Screw. That.
Who is more likely to market sick animals? The one who has 10 in a pen? or the one who has 5000 in a pen?
Is it better to process all of the country's meat or spinach or salad in a single mega-plant, or would we be better off with multiple smaller plants each serving only a small portion of the country?
How fresh is that bag of lettuce if it has been sitting at the edge of a field waiting to be loaded onto a truck, rode in that hot truck on its way to the processing center, mingled with who knows how many other truckloads of lettuce on its way through the processing machinery, waited in the warehouse until a retailer orders it, then spent several days riding on another truck on its way to its final destination?
How nutritious is that hard, pale tomato that can survive a trip of thousands of miles going from field to consumer compared to that tender, juicy tomato that's still warm from the sun because the farmer you bought it from just picked it?
I'm in IT and most of these systems consists of some database, tags, readers and stuff like that. The thing that is expensive is that if it is proprietary it can cost a lot because there is no competition or second souce. If this is a government technology it could be very cheap and easy to use. Excluding small farmers probably doesn't make sense.
Thanks for writing about NAIS and bringing it to the attention of those people who still haven't heard about it. (Although we've been fighting it for years, the govt. isn't exactly out there advertising their plans to the average city dweller.) As a small, struggling, sustainable farmer I am extremely against NAIS for many reasons which I can't go into here or I'll be typing for the next three hours.
I do want to mention two things though:
1. Peter B. is right when he says above, "A small farmer must register, tag, and keep detailed records for every single animal he owns while the mega feedlots are exempt from individual animal identification." Supposedly the factory farms will be able to give several THOUSAND animals the same ID number.
Not only that, there are 'fine points' most people have no idea about, such as not being able to do something like even raise your own animals for your own consumption unless they NEVER leave your property (which means you can't buy a calf from a neighbor or order chicks from a hatchery - or even pick them up from the feed store.)
You can't even ride a HORSE across neighboring properties unless EVERY ONE of them has their property registered.
Fish in your pond are even included in the plans! Please tell me how to tag a catfish with a microchip!
2. I was already irate (not to mention extremely concerned for our future) with this whole seemingly unavoidable NAIS stuff. I read over and over about farmers who have duped, conned, or literally lied to in order to register their property. A big one in Iowa was getting to the farms through the FFA kids who wanted to show their animals at the fairs. How low can the government go?
But then I read about the company manufacturing the mandatory chips for the program -- and the BILLIONS of dollars they stand to make. . .
Wish us all luck, because we're sure going to need it! : )
Susan, FFA kids out here have run into the same thing.
The only tagged salmon I know of are hatchery fish, Jerry. Wild-spawning fish are tag-free.