How the Farm Bureau Paints California Red: NAIS
Sun Oct 15, 2006 at 01:28:04 AM PDT
Today I continue my
diary series about farming issues, the California Farm Bureau, and its weekly newspaper,
Ag Alert, and how the newspaper is used to push Republican talking points on rural Californians. This week, I'll stray away from the newspaper (hasn't come yet, oddly) and discuss NAIS, the National Animal Identification System.
Now, NAIS is not a creation of Congress. It's been created completely at the USDA on their own initiative, claiming that it is authorized by the Patriot Act. Thus, there are no rules set in stone, and those that have been developed have been changing in the last few months due to increasingly angry public response.
Ag Alert on NAIS, from July 2006.
Most people haven't heard of NAIS, though it's starting to get big on the various animal-related BBS on the internet. In short, it's an attempt to give USDA a means to track every farm animal, or animal of farm heritage, and every property that houses same, in the United States. Covered by the regulation would be: aquaculture, camelids (llamas and alpacas), cattle/bison, deer/elk, horses, goats, poultry, sheep, and pigs.
So, you have horses? You'll have to register your premises with the USDA and inform them whenever your animals leave your property. You have a pet pot-bellied pig? You're covered, even though presumably you don't ever expect Fluffy to become bacon.
All animal owners are affected, not just food producers.
USDA motivation
The reason for this is to have better contact tracking in case of a disease outbreak, especially for diseases that affect our ability to export livestock or meat. What they say on TV (if they're on TV; this is pretty low profile for most of you) is that it's meant to preseve the food supply - ie, if they find a sick animal, they can find where it has been more easily. This is true. However, when you couple this with USDA's traditional methods of disease control, a lot of small scale animal owners start getting really nervous - because frequently their strategy has been to destroy every animal they can find within a certain radius. And there's the very real sense that the purpose of NAIS is to make sure they know every door to knock on, and how many dead animals to leave behind.
Some infections are rapidly fatal. Others are economic disasters - animals get sick and become unproductive, or too expensive to nurse back to health. Either kind of disease can also kill the export market for that animal. And the species matters. Vesicular Stomatitis, which causes nasty blisters on the mouth of horses or cows, won't kill an animal, but it will keep it from eating. In horses, where most horses get a fair amount of one-on-one care, it's annoying but such nursing is very possible. In a herd of 1,000 cattle, nursing them all back to health is logistically impossible and certainly cannot be done economically. Others relate to human disease, weakly or strongly. If a flu pandemic hits, even though transmission would be person-to-person and not bird-to-person, what better way to show We're Doing Something than to kill a few million domestic birds?
USDA does generally compensate owners of animals they destroy - by the pound. They have no way of handling the case of an animal with other value - rare breeding stock, personal pet, an unusually outstanding individual - either financially or to consider that the owner would be willing to consider drastic measures to keep the animals alive.
Some icky examples of USDA disease control (warning, can be sad, possibly graphic)
Chickens killed in woodchipper
3 million birds killed to stop Exotic Newcastle
Pet pigs at private hunt club shot
Destroyed sheep tested negative
What else is wrong with this picture: little guy meet boot heel, politician meet economic reality
NAIS has been written and designed to fit the needs of large producers neatly. It allows them to track back an animal, perhaps one of thousands, but not at too high a price - for example, a megaflock of chickens can be tracked as a single lot number... born all together in the same place, raised together, and then shipped and slaughtered together. A single lot number covering 500 chickens is pretty managable and cost-effective.
Consider, in contrast, your local free-range grower. He doesn't have enough chickens to consitute a lot, and even if he did, his chickens didn't all come from a mega-egg mart. And, he doesn't slaughter them all in a single day, usually. He will have to have a tracking number for each chicken, which will be assigned with a leg band. Thing is, a leg band costs around $2, and as a chicken grows from chick to adult, you can expect to need 4. That's $8 added on to the cost of small farmer's chicken. Now, for you congressmen out there who don't go to the grocery store, a supermarket sells a shrinkwrapped dead and cleaned name brand whole chicken for about $3 (99 cents a pound this week at Safeway). Organic chickens at the supermarket run more like $3-$4 per lb, making a whole organic chicken cost around $10. (Specialty producers sometimes cost even more.) There's obviously no margin to add $8 to the price of a locally grown or organic chicken. (Heck, I would be hard pressed to raise my own chickens for $3, even if I valued my labor at $0, just in direct costs.)
So, that's $8 assuming the chicken stays home.
Big Brother Is Watching You
The point of NAIS is to track all movements. What if you have animals that travel? Perhaps your daughter is raising chickens for 4-H and showing them. And, of course, you'll have to report each purchase and each sale, at the very least.
NAIS has already begun voluntary registration of every property parcel that has animals of the target species in some states. The dates keep moving as to when this will be mandatory (outcry does have an effect), but we could be looking at 2007 or 2008 in some states. What if you don't register? Apparently this will be a state decision, but penalties of many thousands of dollars have been proposed at various times.
This will all go into a national database. USDA has vacillated on how this will work; sometimes it's a government database, and sometimes it will be done through the [snark] cost-saving, security conscious[/snark] efficiency of private companies competing for your business. Even if your time isn't valuable, USDA expects there will be a fee for every data transaction. Penalty amounts for not registering your premise or not reporting movement have been thrown around; it's safe to say there would be a penalty and that it would add up pretty quickly, whatever it ends up being.
Chickens don't move all that often. But other animals do. Horses, for example, may move off their home premise every day on trail rides, and every weekend for horse shows or other events. Note that with horses especially, having detailed tracking information on the horse's whereabouts is also detailed information on the owner. If my horse went to Sacramento on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I probably did too. Is it right for the government to be tracking my movements in that manner? Who will have access to the database and who will keep it secure? That information, received on Thursday, is a pretty good bet that my home will be vacant until Sunday, just as an example.
Even cows move. In California, parcels get smaller and smaller as land prices rise. There are cattle people who are putting together grazing on a lot of small parcels, including those owned by absentee owners or recent arrivals who aren't actually farming their land. They rotate grazing as necessary to keep each property healthy - which could be every few days. Sometimes they put them in a stock trailer, sometimes they just drive them down the road. This is good management, for the grass, more sound than feeding cows hay next door to a field where someone is paid to mow the estate with a tractor, and a clever use of resources, not something to be discouraged.
I don't want a microchip in my daughter and I don't want a microchip in any of my animals that is intended for the Government's benefit. Having a small subsistence farm is difficult enough without new regulations. NAIS might make sense if it applied only to people with more than several hundred animals intended for food, but it makes no sense for small producers and even less for people who keep animals for pets and companionship, not slaughter.
NAIS is the epitome of Big Government, and Vaguely Good Intentions Gone Horribly Wrong
NAIS invades our privacy and restricts our freedoms. NAIS will endanger our food supply by further concentrating it in the hands of large producers and national distributors. There are dueling bills in Congress, one to defund the program, and one to codify it (sponsored by Talent R-MO and Emerson R-MO). Let your representatives know what you think.
Other places to read about NAIS and about regulations punishing small farms for the sins of the large:
http://www.stopanimalid.org/
http://nonais.org/ (includes list of representatives and organizations in pro- and anti- NAIS camps)
http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/...
http://www.grain.org/... - how bird flu is being used to eliminate local competition in Asia
http://www.countrysidemag.com/...
http://www.survivalblog.com/...
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