The government recognizes the need to keep bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as Mad Cow, out of the food chain, and we all expect it to. This involves (among other things) testing animals to make sure none of them carry BSE - and if a cow with BSE is discovered, tracking where it came from, and which other cattle were with it that might also have the disease.
NAIS - the National Animal ID System - started as a solution to the animal identification and tracking half of that very problem. However, some say it's being implemented with FEMA-like expertise and it's more of an unfunded mandate and a Patriot Act for animals than a way to solve any problems. Now it's a major election issue in the Missouri senate race.
More on the flip...
First of all, what is it? It's a program set up by the USDA that is currently voluntary, with plans to make it mandatory in the future. All farms are supposed to register with a "Premise ID Number" and then animals can either be identified with an individual "Animal ID Number" or by lot. Animals covered include: aquaculture, camelids (llamas and alpacas), cattle/bison, deer/elk, horses, goats, poultry, sheep, and pigs.
Right now there are 2 bills in Congress - one to by ag whore Collin Peterson (D-MN), and one by ag whore Senator Talent (R-MO). (Talent received MORE $$ than any other politician in the country from Big Ag in 2006, by the way, so you can just guess where his interests lie).
I started hearing about NAIS several months ago from comments on diaries with links to sites like NoNAIS.org. Last week, Elfling wrote a fantastic diary summarizing all of the reasions why NAIS will hurt small farms, 4-H members, people who keep pet pot-bellied pigs, people who own horses, etc. Here are some highlights:
NAIS will unreasonably increase the cost of family-farmed meat.
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.
The government deals with problems by killing them.
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.
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.
When you track the animal, sometimes you also track the owner.
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.
Yesterday I went to the farmer's market to see if small farmers from Wisconsin shared the same concerns that Elfling brought up.
First, I asked a guy who was selling pasture-raised pork what his opinion of NAIS was. He said he didn't know much about it, but he didn't sign up and he wasn't going to unless somebody made him. He felt like there was a real need to track animals that might have BSE, but he didn't like the way things were being done and he wanted nothing to do with it. He brought up the spinach scare, and said how the government traced it to a factory farm dairy, and they could eliminate the E. coli by changing the cows' diets to alfalfa - but they don't. He said it's all about who has money and who has power. Then he picked up his copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma and recommended that I read it. I told him I had :)
Next, I asked a woman who raises pasture-raised sheep, pork, and chickens. She said she waited until the last possible moment and then she registered her sheep. She wants her flock to be certified scrapie-free (a disease sheep can get similar to BSE in cows) and now when she takes them to get tested for it, they ask for the sheep's animal ID numbers. She thinks the government should butt out of her farm, and she's afraid that when things get mandatory, they will go after the pasture-raised animals first instead of going after the factory farmed ones.
Last, I asked a man who sold grass-fed bison. He said there was no National Animal ID System, so I should come back and ask for his opinion when the government got its act together. He envisioned it would work with some sort of computer database, and perhaps eartags or microchips in the animals, and as long as the government could keep the costs down for the farmers, then he didn't see a problem. He elaborated that his bison weren't really what the government was looking for to begin with - they were born on his farm, and they spent their whole lives there too. I added that since he fed them grass, they weren't going to ever have a problem. He said, "I hope not!"
As I walked away, I thought about that. Even if his bison did have a problem, it would be incredibly simple to find each and every one of them before they got too far into the food system - completely the opposite from a diseased factory farm cow who might be mixed up with who knows how many other cows to make hamburgers.
Two thoughts here:
First, if the government was truly interested AT ALL in preventing or even just discovering cases of BSE - they would be looking for it in addition to tracking the animals. This year, the government scaled back testing for BSE by about 90%.
Second, one of the "quality gurus" they teach about in business school said to "build quality in." In other words - build a good product. If you are testing once the product is already built and throwing out the bad ones, that is not good enough. I think this applies here.
The small family farmers selling meat at the farmer's market build the quality into their products. They do it so well, in fact, that they don't mind showing their faces and answering questions about how their animals were raised, treated, fed, and even slaughtered. Can you imagine a factory farm doing the same thing. "Hi - what did you feed that chicken?" "Ummm, arsenic." Riiiight.
These animals probably do not need a costly Big Brother-like government tracking system, particularly if it would put their owners at any more of a competitive disadvantage than they are already at. They build the quality in. When the finished product is done, most of the time, it's an excellent, safe product. If it's not - well, it's easy to track down where all the rest of the animals came from and where they went.
Factory farms do not build the quality in. The answer is NOT testing and tracking their crap quality products. That's a poor excuse for letting them feed animals things animals shouldn't eat and put animal poop places animal poop shouldn't go. But, since they aren't going to play by the rules that Mother Nature set and diseases like BSE are going to keep popping up - a tracking system is a next-best option if you're going to have enough testing to go along with it to make it worthwhile.
Here's a quote from when the reduced numbers of cows that will be tested for BSE were announced in March:
"This would be a tenth of a percent of all animals slaughtered," Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union, said Tuesday. "This starts to be so small that in our opinion, it approaches a policy of 'Don't look, don't find.'"
I'll just add to that: Don't look, don't find, why track?
When will we stop screwing around and start making real changes? If you want to see progress, vote with your dollars. Buy family farmed meat if you eat meat. Buy locally from farmers you know.