Foes of old animal-ID program oppose new one

In February we reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture had abandoned the Bush-era National Animal Identification System that would have tracked livestock from "birth to the butcher shop" in favor of a narrower and more low-tech system, but USDA has a new idea and many of the groups who opposed the Bush program are rallying against it. The new program, named Animal Disease Traceability, would apply only to animals involved in interstate commerce and would use use of metal tags to trace the movement of animals from state to state instead of the radio-frequency ID tags used in the NAIS program, Richard Oswald and Bill Bishop report for the Daily Yonder.

The first USDA meeting on the program was held last month in Kansas City, where the message was USDA "doesn’t want to meddle in intrastate sales and that it's most interested in cattle," Oswald and Bishop write. USDA said its goal was to create a standard numbering system so a single cow could be traced back to its herd of origin within five days. USDA is also trying to avoid many of the objections raised against NAIS, including using a system owned entirely by states and tribal nations instead of a private database that may have allowed meatpackers and animal-rights groups access to herd information.

But those who opposed NAIS see the new program as a slippery slope. "I’ve been studying the antics of Washington bureaucrats for 50 years and I know this is just another ploy to give farmers and ranchers a feeling of security, when all the while they are in the process of coming back with a much more draconian plan," independent agricultural journalist Derry Brownfield recently wrote. "The name has been changed and descriptive words have been eliminated and replaced with other objectives, but government continues to push towards turning the control of our livestock industry over to the multinational meatpackers. The coyotes howl along the trail but the wagons keep rolling along." USDA will host two more meetings about the program on June 24 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and on July 1 in Fort Worth, Tex. (Read more)

UPDATE, July 2: The agriculture subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding for the program.