Sustainable Food

Don't Tag Those Critters!

by Natasha Chart

categories: Farm Economics, Livestock, Policy, Urban Agriculture

Published March 11, 2009 @ 06:17AM PT

Max Thornsberry, President of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF) will be testifying in the morning against the National Animal ID System (NAIS):

“Mandatory animal identification is not an effective tool for preventing the introduction of diseases into the U.S. cattle herd and its misapplication as a disease prevention tool is contributing to the introduction and spread of foreign animal diseases,” Thornsberry said. “USDA has been highly successful at eradicating cattle diseases using existing resources and time-proven programs, as evidenced by its near-complete eradication of brucellosis and its significant reduction in bovine tuberculosis in the domestic cattle herd. ..."

NAIS has drawn fire from people at all ends of the ideological spectrum, as the expense of radio tagging and reporting the movements of one or a few animals is expected to make the ownership of livestock difficult for hobbyists and small producers.

Some ranchers have already sold their herds, as the USDA has expanded its ambitious program to tag and track over 250 million animals, which some say is a marketing gimmick designed to boost industrial agriculture at the expense of small growers and taxpayers:

A handful of industry stakeholders have cast their shadow over nearly every component of NAIS--past, present and future. A consortium of industry leaders--Cargill Meat Solutions, Monsanto and Schering-Plough, among others--pushed for NAIS for more than a decade and finally won the USDA's approval shortly after George W. Bush took office in 2001.

... [I]t will give commercial agriculture an unprecedented monopoly on the future of food--a brave new era of synthetic agriculture and genetically engineered animals.

This era is not beyond some remote horizon. It has already begun. On December 19, the leading cloned livestock producers announced a program designed to monitor meat and milk products from cloned animals as they moved through the food chain. NAIS is the "tracking system" the industry will use to commercialize cloned livestock on a mass scale. ...

Amish and Mennonite growers consider participation in this program to be a violation of their faiths, one that will require them to give up an important part of their way of life - either raising livestock, or avoiding participation in government programs. In Wisconsin, where the state has made premise registration a mandatory part of dairy licensing, some have already given up raising dairy animals.

NAIS will allow disease-generating factory farms to register their animals as a unit, while free range producers and urban agricultural hobbyists raising a few chickens will have to pay for a $1-2 tag for each animal. If you've bought chicken recently, you know that's a significant percentage of the price for a finished bird.

For agriculture to remain sustainable, we need to move away from factory farms and towards small, dispersed growing operations. This takes us exactly the wrong direction. There would only be factory farmed animal products available; from genetically similar animals subjected to terrible diets, pharmaceutical overdosing and unsanitary conditions.

It'd be either veganism or industrial poison - a choice that is a shrieking horror to me.

So act today and tell the USDA no NAIS. Pleeeeease?

(Photo credit: conskeptical on Flickr.)