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April 13, 2006: Whether its purpose is to
increase meat exports or control disease outbreaks, the proposed
National Animal Identification System is ruffling the feathers
of livestock producers, large- and small-scale. NAIS is raising
questions among farmers regarding their privacy, its costs,
the government’s real intent, and -- for small-scale
farmers and homesteaders -- their eventual right to raise
livestock at all.
The United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS) web site (www.aphis.usda.gov)
describes NAIS as a quick way to identify sick or at-risk
animals during a disease outbreak. “The goal of the
National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is to be able
to identify all animals and premises that have had contact
with a foreign or domestic animal disease of concern within
48 hours after discovery. As an information system that provides
for rapid tracing of infected and exposed animals during an
outbreak situation, the NAIS will help limit the scope of
such outbreaks and ensure that they are contained and eradicated
as quickly as possible.”
The system has three phases: registration of premises, registration
of animals linked to a specific registered place number, then
animal tracking. The first phase involves landowners filling
out a questionnaire about the location of their land and what
type of animals they are raising there. At present, this phase
of NAIS is voluntary, but the USDA timeline for the program
calls for 100 percent premises registration by the end of
2008.
You start with a number
Each premises will be assigned a unique, seven-character
identifying number. The animals raised there will be assigned
numbers, as well, although large-scale facilities will be
able to use a group identification number for a flock or herd
that is acquired as a group instead of having individual numbers
for each animal. Small farmers and homesteaders tend to acquire
animals at different times and this option will not be available
to them.
“It’s the same information as is in the phone
book,” said Dore Mobley, APHIS public affairs specialist,
of the premises sign-up. “At present it’s voluntary,
but Wisconsin has gone mandatory, Indiana is in the process,
and Texas is talking about it.”
The second phase – apparently already begun -- involves
tagging animals with a Radio Frequency Identification Device
(RFID). “At present, the only species with an approved
ID device are cattle and bison,” Mobley said. There
are working groups in place to recommend ID devices for other
species such as sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and poultry. The
goal is to have 40 million new animals per year tagged in
2009, the USDA says, with 1 million animals tagged during
2006.
Animal owners will be required to tag every animal that leaves
an identified premises. Every time an animal is sent to auction,
to the slaughter house, to a fair or taken on a trail ride,
the government wants to be informed. Fines of up to $1,000
per day are built into the proposal for non-compliance. Cost
estimates by APHIS run to as much as $3 for each RFID device
and up to $2,000 for readers. There will be additional costs
(read taxes or fees) to administer the program.
Local customers happy without tracking
Texas beef producer Debbie Davis objects to NAIS as an invasion
of privacy. Davis is a member of the recently-formed Farm
and Ranch Alliance, a non-profit lobbying group founded to
oppose NAIS. “I market my product locally,” Davis
said. “I diligently keep records including approximate
calving dates, sires, dams, which pasture they were in at
any given time throughout their life, vaccinations, and any
medical treatments of every one of my animals. I can source
verify for quality control and peace of mind for my customers--with
whom I have contact.
“I have no need to export my product and therefore
no need for government intervention into my record-keeping,”
Davis said. “My property is my own, not the business
of the prying eyes of Big Brother wanting to know how many
animals I own, where they are and how much land I manage.
The way I see it, NAIS is money-driven, having little impact
on practical control of disease and is an unconstitutional
infringement on my privacy.”
Mary Zanoni, of Canton, New York, is a founder and executive
director of Farm for Life. The group’s intent was to
help small-scale producers wade through the ever-growing quagmire
of government regulations. “Farm for Life was founded
… to produce educational materials for people who want
to sell directly to customers from their farm,” Zanoni
said. “But we haven't gotten to do that yet! About the
time we were starting up, NAIS came along and people wanted
to hear about that.”
Then there’s Vermont hog farmer turned NAIS e-activist,
Walter Jeffries. He said NAIS began as a plan to increase
international meat exports, especially to Japan, which requires
that the movements of cattle be physically traceable. The
plan’s rationale shifted to disease prevention in 2003
when a case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or Mad
Cow Disease) was found in the U.S.
Animal-ID industry dream
“NAIS was originally motivated by the large cattle
producers’ and meat exporters’ desire to sell
to markets like Japan that require traceback,” Jeffries
said. “The RFID tag and tracking companies drooled at
such a large market and backed the plan out of greed. They
stand to sell 12 billion tags a year to a mandatory captive
market. At a minimum of $3 each, this represents tens of billions
of dollars in annual sales for them.”
Jeffries disputes the stated goal of NAIS, which is rapid
response to disease outbreaks. “The Ag Department is
doing everything but the right thing,” Jeffries said.
“They claim they need premises ID so that they will
know where all the poultry is in the event of Avian Influenza
(H5N1) so that they can kill it.” According to Jeffries,
NAIS would give the USDA the power to destroy any susceptible
livestock within 10 kilometers of a disease outbreak.
He stumbled upon NAIS by accident two years ago when he was
looking for information on applying for a sustainable ag grant.
Appalled by the implications of NAIS for small-scale producers,
he began a letter writing campaign, but no one responded.
After repeated tries, he launched the website NoNAIS.org
in October of 2006.
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Jeffries sees clear danger from NAIS, if it works as proposed
and if it goes only slightly wrong. “In addition to
sheep and poultry we breed pastured pigs. We sell both piglets
and full-sized market pigs. If NAIS goes through, we will
stop selling piglets because it’s too expensive and
too much of a risk for us,” he explained.”Under
the government's NAIS plan, if a piglet left our farm and
contracted a disease somewhere else, the government could
easily mistakenly trace-back to our farm. They could then
come to our farm and kill all of our breeding stock and other
animals without testing, a warrant, or any form of legal appeal.
This is a violation of our Constitutional rights.”
No help against food-borne pathogens
Jeffries and Zanoni point out that food-borne disease poses
a much more common and serious threat to the human population
that NAIS does not even address. Disease prevention will come
from better import controls, more-thorough facilities inspections
and incentives for agricultural methods that stress biodiversity
and access to natural pasture.
NAIS will be especially costly to small-scale livestock producers,
because their profit margins are already small. “NAIS
would make it more expensive to raise food for my own family
by approximately $500 per year,” Jeffries said. “This
amounts to a hidden tax on our food. With NAIS there are annual
fees, costs for tags, threats of high fines if we make a mistake,
and NAIS is such a complex system that it is guaranteed a
lot of people will make innocent mistakes.
“The big factory farms get to use group animal IDs,
because they do everything all-in and all-out at the same
time, as a flock or herd. “Homesteaders and small farmers
have mixed-age animals which means we would be required to
tag, record, report and track every single, individual animal.
This puts small farms at even more of a disadvantage and favors
the big factory farms since they can keep their costs and
effort low,” Jeffries said.
Zanoni says strict Christian groups which insist on a literal
reading of Revelations 13 will refuse to place what they feel
could be a “Mark of the Beast” on their animals.
A different and significant religious issue is with the use
of the technology per se. One Amish spokesman stated publicly
at a local NAIS local meeting in Wisconsin that electronic
animal identification is forbidden for their use. This could
be a problem without some flexibility, which is not currently
being considered. “There is no opt out,” said
APHIS’s Mobley. “Animals are to be tagged before
leaving the premises. Perhaps the Amish could have an intermediary.”
Great for exporters, no benefit for local
sales
As a program for large-scale producers interested in export
markets, mandatory participation in NAIS may make sense, but
it could spell the end for many small producers. “NAIS
should be kept as a strictly voluntary program,” Jeffries
said. “NAIS is not about disease. It is about profits
for the big meat-exporting companies and the RFID tag manufacturers.
States love it, because once NAIS becomes mandatory, they
will charge a $10 or more premises ID fee per year.
“If you raise your own food, you end up paying a tax
to do so,” he stated. “This burden will fall most
heavily on the rural poor who least can afford to pay it.”
NAIS could also do serious damage to the local foods movement
that is spreading across the country. Local foods proponents
stress buying directly from small producers to save family
farms and to provide consumers with fresh, wholesome food
that is not trucked thousands of miles.
Tim Bowser is a local foods entrepreneur and former executive
director of the FoodRoutes Network (www.foodroutes.org),
a group which assists efforts to rebuild local, community-based
food systems.
“I believe that the proposed National Animal Identification
Program is an absolute joke as a solution to the problem of
livestock disease outbreaks and a very significant threat
to local food systems,” Bowser said. “It will
hurt most the very livestock and poultry producers who are
the solution to diseases associated with CAFOs [factory farms]
-- those appropriately scaled producers that serve direct
farmer-to-consumer markets, especially organic and pasture-based
meat, poultry, and dairy operations.”
Big pork, beef cite cost to farmers
Ironically, the solution to the NAIS problem may come from
the very people who started it: the large meat producers.
During testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee
on Livestock and Horticulture Committee on Agriculture, Joy
Phillippi, current president of the National Pork Producers
Council, testified that pork producers are willing to go along
with NAIS as long as it doesn’t involve any increase
in costs to the producers. “The pork industry supports
an effective swine database, accessible by both federal and
state animal health officials, without producers having to
pay additional costs over and above that which they already
pay today.”
In an APHIS Fact Sheet titled National Animal Identification
System: Goal and Vision, dated January, 2005, APHIS states
that, “Both public and private funding will be required
for the NAIS to become fully operational.” Private funding
means out of the producers’ pockets, both large and
small.
In the cattle camp, an
article by Joe Roybal in the on-line newsletter BEEF reported
that beef producers were more concerned about the costs of
implementing NAIS than they were about the possible privacy
issues. “A mid-October survey of 16,223 readers found
21.2 percent consider data confidentiality their biggest single
concern with NAIS,” Roybal wrote. “More concerning
was the cost and labor requirements of NAIS for producers
(48.3 percent). Coming in third was the potential for producer
liability under NAIS.”
NAIS isn’t a done deal yet. On his web site, Jeffries
gives detailed instructions for fighting NAIS, including sample
letters and contact information for legislators. “The
comment periods are still open,” Jeffries said. “The
USDA needs to know, in no uncertain terms, that people are
not going to stand still for this sort of treatment. Big business
should not be able to take over every aspect of our lives
and profit from everything. Individual independence and freedom
are more important to maintaining our national security than
profits.” 
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