Slashdot Mirror
Ranchers Have Beef With USDA Program To ID Cattle
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities. The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database. 'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS. One group has issued a bumper sticker that reads, 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' 'They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,' says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. 'This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.'"
LOL
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Nothing ever changes. This is the exact argument that they made in the 1900's when the FDA was first trying to reduce the number of human body parts that made it into canned meat: "Waaaaaa, you're going to put us out of business! Waaaaaaaa, no one could ever collect this much information!"
I call BS. If I stole a cow from one of those giant farms, the damn rancher'd be able to identify it in a second, but the instant you want to track something for public safety reasons, "there is no way they could ever collect that information."
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
From the summary: "'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen"
It's true. When The Jungle was published, TR responded with the Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulated and inspected meat packing plants (he also went vegetarian for a little while, which, if you know TR, shows you how much he was affected by Sinclair's book).
Contrary to what many people might think, the large meat companies supported the act. It 1) Improved public perception of the safety of meat, increasing sales, 2) Opened up American meats to the European market and 3) Added significant costs to the industry, which put their smaller competitors out of business.
You can learn a lot from history.
Perhaps you should move to a tyrannical government where they don't even act like they listen to the people and if your business gets hurt they don't care. Perhaps Iran or North Korea? Plus, if you don't like it you can choose not to support the meat industry its not like people are shoving steaks down your throat. If you want to be a vegetarian or vegan, fine, but you have no right to deprive people of their living just because you dislike it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If all of us can take off our shoes etc. every time we fly to see grandma or get on a ferry, ranchers and meat packers can sure has hell do what it takes to make sure no one else dies of Mad Cow disease and the like in the US. Quit being greedy bastards. If there are some issues to fix, work with USDA (you all practically owned the place for the last 8 years).
You can take my bacon when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
You aren't the mainstream media, you don't have to put those oh so clever puns in the title.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
I think the ranchers oppose having their animals chipped because then it becomes too easy for the government to abuse its power and round their cattle up like cattle.
Are you adequate?
The cost of the rfids would be practically nothing. They have to give them their shots anyway (mmmmm, tasty growth hormone), so that's just one more.
The movement issue is more real, because the range on the readers is tiny, but we've all seen lab experiments where hackers read an rfid enabled card from 200 feet away with a cantenna, so I'm not inclined to believe this to be an unsolvable problem.
And the internet thing is a joke. The amount of actual data collected would be pretty small (in the grand scheme). Uploading it every week or so wouldn't be a huge burden.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You are an idiot who can't even RTFS. This regulation would hurt the small sustainable ranchers who are teetering on the edge of being able to compete, while benefiting the large-scale industry that you abhor.
I'd pay more for them to change the way they do business rather than DIE from consuming their PRODUCT.
But you know me, I'm funny that way.
crazy dynamite monkey
The difference is that if a person contracts a disease that is a public health risk, the person is generally able to tell physicians who he/she might have had contact with so that person can get treatment, possibily saving their life and slowing the disease spread. Cows can't tell investigators where they have been and who should be notified.
Regarding the cost, I can't imagine that this would be more expensive that the cost of destroying entire herds of cattle when one cow comes down with a confirmed or probable case of these diseases. Being able to isolate the infected could decrease the numbers needed to be destoyed saving money. The difference is that farms can claim the loss of the animal in insurance which is a sunk cost, versus a preventative cost. This would save money upstream as well in the form of smaller recalls to distributors, which seem to happen more and more frequently in the US.
Internet access isn't a good excuse as a low-bandwidth cellular scanner would be enough to report via SOAP web-service to whatever database; not to mention that every industry has costs-of-doing-business and this will/could be one of those things.
I haven't read enough to comment on the implementation of this plan but on the surface, I can't see why this wouldn't be a good idea from a public health perspective.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Right now if a ranch has a serious infection they can quietly dispose of the corpses and obviously infected. If there's a government database it becomes pretty obvious if way too few cattle make it to market from a ranch.
Also, it makes it obvious if someone tries to market a cow they didn't purchase, that perhaps strayed onto their land (it does happen, especially in areas with open grazing permits).
'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.'
Ha! As if. Look, we grant cattle no rights, so it's not infringing their rights to have them be tracked. So it's a far step from there to tracking humans. It's like saying "Squashing spiders with slippers today, squashing people with slippers soon'. It's nonsensical. Besides, the reason cows have no rights is because they aren't capable of even thinking about the concept of rights much less engaging in protests etc to gain them. So not only are they different morally, they're different practically because it's not like the government could just come and start tracking us all without us noticing and burning down the Capitol.
Hmm? What do you mean "what's that hanging from my ear?" Some piece of plastic with a number on it? Well so there is! Geeze, I don't remember getting my ear pierced, but I did get pretty drunk last Friday... I remember somebody in a suit pointing at me and then I felt like I wanted to lie down... But I must have gone into the tattoo and piercing parlor and gotten pierced. With a tacky and crappy earring too, that doesn't seem to want to come off... I hope I didn't get tattooed too... Oh geeze, what the hell?! "19273g"? What the hell kind of tattoo is that? Alright that's it, no more Friday night benders for me.
Now what was I saying? Oh yeah. Some people are so paranoid!
The enemies of Democracy are
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FUCK YOU. I abhor your fucking vegetarians industry. Dumb fucks. Plants are living things too. Why stop there then? Nothing, and I mean nothing, not even religious zealots, piss me off more than vegetarians. EAT MOAR CHIKUN bitches. And before you mod this TROLL, read what I'm saying. Its true.
So, if these places don't have Internet, then have a way for them to send in the changes. It should be a simple "cow XXXX received 1/1/01" and "cow YYYY departed 2/2/02" and that should be something that could be tracked by hand, if necessary. Make the tracking required (with microchips and matching ear-tags). Let the ranchers figure out whether tracking electronically or by hand is easier.
Oh, and if the beef industry is about to go under, it's only because the cows have unionized and the bulls will be headed to Congress to ask for a bailout. They may not make much profit, but their product is not very elastic so everyone would just bump up the cost a little and their sales wouldn't take a huge hit, so they can "teeter" another 200 years.
Learn to love Alaska
Just like testing all cows for MCD would also destroy the industry, because any positive would kill exports and greatly impact domestic consumption.
So we only test a small percentage of pre-selected cows and get no positive results.
Problem solved.
And since we know in advance that the cows won't test positive, there is no reason to tag them.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That's fine, we abhor you too.
-The Meat Industry.
"Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon." Too late; I already have a cell phone. I'm already being tracked.
Don't chip your cows. But when the EU, Japan or China bans US beef, don't expect me to back up your complaining. I'm siding with them. And if my supermarket carries beef or food with beef by-products warranted as having been tracked vs untracked varieties, guess which brand I'm buying?
Have gnu, will travel.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The black-hats will have a field day with this one. Imagine aquiring full access to a cattle farmers database.
It would be like virtual biological warfare. You could modify the database in devious ways, slowly causing the collapse of a legitamate business.
As far as the cost of the tags and not having internet access; I realize cattle farming is hard work, but on the other hand I have never seen a poor cattle farmer.
In this case the farmers are right. The cattle are branded with a unique brand so the rancher knows who it belongs to. In addition, cattle are given an eartag so that the slaughter houses can tell where they came from. Cattle comes from two sources...large industrial like feedlots where the cattle are crowded into a small area and fed grain ...or on ranches where they go free range and graze on grasses. Since a large operation would have maybe 1000 head of cattle, it can be presumed that from the ear tags, if a slaughtered cow is found to have some disease at the slaughter house, it can be narrowed down to one ranch or feed lot.
Now, because of the close confines of the feedlot, it can easily be presumed that the sick cow came into close proximity with all the other cattle there. And so the new technology is just simply not needed, it's a wasteful expense.
For the rancher, equiping each of his hands with a scanner gets expensive. The data is instantly intrusive, as in "why didn't you pasture your cows this way" and in some instances could easily be used by overzealous groups (ie peta) to grief ranchers about their animal husbandry practices.
All in all, it's a lot of expense, a lot of trouble, and a lot of intrusion, for very little is actual gain. In the efforts at finding disease, relying on this system alone to reduce the number of animals tested could mean that positives slip by because they weren't tested as they didn't show up in the contact list for the sick cow.
I guess now we'll know.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
About examining women's buttocks?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/06/29/1733250/Artist-Wins-pound20000-Grant-To-Study-Womens-Butts
Is it too much to ask for?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This program will spare us from having to kill off all these thousands of cattle just because 1 or 2 was diagnosed with some rare disease.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I swear, people (in government especially) think that because we have these computers we have to fill them up with data. People end up unnecessarily being slaves to the damn computer.
I say let it go down. Regulate them into the dust. (Full disclosure, I abhor the meat industry.)
It's fair to have that opinion, but you do realize that a LARGE part of the economy is dependant on cattle. If you think the economy sucks now, let the "meat industry" (including dairy, fast food, grocery stores and numerous other) die.
Even if it all doesn't fall down like dominoes (and it would), you're talking about a lot of people losing their jobs, most of the physical area of the US falling into economic decay. Maybe you didn't mean to flamebait, but geez, what you're talking about is pretty terrible stuff in reality.
as small toy makers. Mattel, Hasbro, et al. wrote the Lead-Free legislation. Not too surprisingly the requirements are onerous for local one-off type toy makers that saw a boon after the lead doped Chinese manufactured toy story broke. This is the tragedy of American democracy. You don't really have much say in law. Well connected people with money do.
46 & 2
> This regulation would hurt the small sustainable ranchers who are
> teetering on the edge of being able to compete, while benefiting
> the large-scale industry that you abhor.
So true! There's an unholy alliance between big business and big government; there's a list of examples in Timothy Carney's latest column. For more of the same, he's also the author of The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money.
The Army reading list
They're hemming and hawing about the costs? It's about $6 per tag today. Economy of scale could drive that a lot lower. And the tags can be removed and recycled into a new animal (betcha didn't know that!) -- after being properly sterilized, of course. They last about a 100+ years. The reader itself, as a handheld model runs anywhere from $150 to $1000 depending on range and other options. It's not necessary for it to connect to the internet or anything like that -- and the amount of data we're talking about could be handled via a 9600 baud modem! It's just a serial number for crissakes. Yes, farmers have teh intarwebs too. -_-
Each beef cow is worth about $800. Assuming 10% of the chips need to be replaced per... that's 60 cents. For something worth $800. The overhead here really is negligible, especially for a CAFO. That's an industrial feed lot, for those of you who don't know -- they're fed corn and kept in stalls, not grass-fed and left in fields. And did I mention it's all tax-deductible? Most everything on a farm is. Well, except you, that is. hehe.
So, in short... It's bull. Literally and figuratively. //Disclaimers: I have five dots in Lore:Rural. I am also a computer geek.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I read in an article, that escapes me at the moments, that there were plants fossilized that proved they were in all regards sentient and a lot more active than VenusFlytraps. The reason they died-out was because back when the dinosaurs were around they were thought to be trampled from the constant foraging, and that it couldn't maintane a symbiotic relationship on the sides of constantly-groomed trees that it was attached onto.
Thank God that the Japanese have been drawing this plant for years in their manga, to remind us of what we missed all these thousands of years. I wouldn't mind having my ass stuffed by a pulsating root looking for the source of the tasty fertilizer.
(I'm a different AC.)
I don't want to go so far as to call you an idiot, but I'll note that "this is going to hurt the small sustainable ranchers while benefiting the large-scale industry" is a CLAIM made by those small ranchers, not necessarily a fact. It's in the summary, yes, but it shouldn't be treated as fact right away.
I talked recently to a small farmer with a few cows. They are already required to document entry and exit of cattle into and out of each county. Since their farm has multiple fields which are in two separate counties, they are required to submit this documentation each time they move an animal between the two fields. Which is of course stupid, but the regulations were designed without any consideration for a split-county operation like this.
This person has maybe 20 head, total. With the existing regulations it is almost too much to bother with. Adding more tracking, with more hardware requirements and obviously training for all hands involved it is going to be impractical for them to continue.
Yes, there were some feed problems for cows. Most of these problems have been identified and dealt with. I suspect there are still a few, but nothing that is going to create anything like the mad cow panic. Piling more and more regulation, especially regulation that is not focused on real problems buy imaginary ones, will simply mean that all cattle are raised by factory farms.
Hell yeah! Let's replace them with some nice camps where we can slaughter vegan scum.
I mean since everyone seems to not know this mad cow disease is actually extremely rare. So rare that there are no known cases being caused by US, New Zealand, Canadian, or Australian beef the last time I checked.(Mostly because it's so cheap to feed cows here in the US corn and grass, beef producers generally don't bother feeding them that ground up animal garbage or if they do only at the very end. Outlaw that practice and you wouldn't have to worry.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
(Speaking as someone who works within one of the largest meatworks company in Australia, so each to their own)
Over here in Australia, we have had a National Livestock Identification Scheme (NLIS) RFID ear tags on cows for about the last 3 yrs.
The tags themselves work out to about $3.50AU ea. The growers were a bit unhappy at the start but it was compulsory so they got over it. Im sure prices were jacked up accordingly to cover the cost.
All the info is stored in a goverment owned db and at time of slaughter or sale can checked to confirm that the cow was free from disease.
The most expensive part is probably the RFID wands as there is only one company in Australia that specializes in RFID wands for the cattle industry.
Anyway, in the end. The small growers are still alive and doing well. Nothings really changed, except now there is a tracking system for cows to ensure quality meat.
That's not entirely true. The government, especially the USDA uses my tax dollars to subsidize meat production and consumption. I guess you'll just tell me to leave or something lame.
If Australian cattle farmers, including the operators of the 6,000,000 acre Anna Creek Station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_station) in South Australia can implement tagging of all of their cattle, why can't you Americans just do it as well, instead of whining? I take it the US won't be complaining when Japan, Korea and the European Union don't want to buy their untraceable beef. (http://www.mla.com.au/TopicHierarchy/IndustryPrograms/NationalLivestockIdentificationSystem/default.htm)
The irony is that should we have an outbreak of mad cow disease traced to beef these same ranchers will come begging to the government for aid. I don't understand how those who worship at the altar of Capitalism (or the Marketplace if you prefer) bemoan the disappearance of the smaller less efficient ranches. Office Depot and Staples killed off the independent office supply store, it was not the end of civilization. I'm not defending the virtue of large corporations but I don't automatically associate virtue with small size either.
You must be one of those vegan hippy fags. Please go and choke on a soy bean.
That program sounds fantastic to me. And this opinion is not influenced at all by the beef industry.
I might say that maybe we should just start by making it illegal to feed animals (especially old/diseased animals) to herbivore livestock. Or maybe make antibiotic feed illegal. Maybe just require labeling of if you use antibiotics or GE meat.
But I wouldn't say any of that. I love the Texas beef industry.
*please don't sue me*
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...at just how fast the powers that be can track down a food contamination all the way to a herd and all the way thru the herd to an individual calf and even back to the rancher who reared that calf. So... what are they trying to do here? We ALREADY have measures in place that allows us to track diseased cattle - it's far more accurate and faster even than tracking produce and trying to find contaminated tomatoes! It's not broken - and they're trying to fix it. Usually when that happens, there's an agenda.
Last September, in Moo IT Computerworld had a slightly less paranoid version of this story.
What scares me about this idea is in the article itself. 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' seems so much more likely than I thought at first.
FTA: "The FDA wants to track cow movements in case a breakout of bovine tuberculosis."
Why does this sound very similar to an arguement in 20 years saying...
"The US Government wants to track human movements in case a breakout of ."
I could totally see the Government setting up 'checkpoints' at airports, highways, etc that you walk/drive by and it just watches where you go. Scary thought, but I believe the technology to make this a reality is here already. Anyone disagree?
If the bovine has done nothing wrong, surely it has nothing to fear from being tracked. After what's the worst that can happen to it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
While the meat industry, and food industry in general, is guilty of a swathe of scandals, it's important to remember that without that industry, few of us would eat as well as we do.
If we want to have cheap, (reasonably) nutritious food, then some policies of the food industry are going to have to be tolerated to a certain degree. This doesn't mean we should accept all of the repulsive practices that the industry has come up with. But it does mean that our meat is not always going to come to our table via paths we'd like it to take.
May the Maths Be with you!
When ya get a few thousand cows stomping around in their shit all day long eating things they were never meant to eat and getting injected with cocktails of chemicals.. tracking them really doesn't seem like the problem to me..
You are an idiot who can't even RTFS. This regulation would hurt the small sustainable ranchers who are teetering on the edge of being able to compete, while benefiting the large-scale industry that you abhor.
Actually, there are very few small sustainable ranchers that are teetering on the edge of being able to compete. Most of them have either sold out to the big cattle companies long ago (because they essentially were forced out of business) or they have moved into niche markets.
The "small rancher" is a myth, just like the "family farm". The corporate cattle ranches and corporate farms have a ton of clout and have essentially manipulated the laws to benefit their assembly-line methods of producing food, all the while playing on the public perception of small ranches and farms.
Of course, I'm just as much of a hypocrite, because I'm more than willing to take the cost savings on assembly-line food (even though sustainable food definitely does taste a lot better and also is healthier).
The troll with karma.
Here's the problem a lot of use have with NAIS.The NAIS was created as a "scientic" alternative to athe "unscientic" practice of actually testing the cattle for BSE. NAIS would effectively prohibit smaller prohibit those like myself with the capability to raise 1 or calves to slaughter weight. As it stands today NAIS applies to all live stock, even a flock of laying hens. Yes tags are cheap, readers and proprietary software aren't. The cost of BSE testing or even NAIS can be spread across producer, commodity trader, processor, retail chain, and consumer. Problem is no one wants to pay there share for a safe food supply. In the end the multinational corporations are going to control the food supply from insemination to your mouth.
I recall there was a documentary on the topic.
Plus, if you don't like it you can choose not to support the slave industry its not like people are forcing you to own slaves. If you don't want to own slaves then, fine, but you have no right to deprive people of their living just because you dislike it.
My understanding is that the current plan is to allow large corporate operations, that move large numbers of animals around at a time, to identify them as a "unit" While smaller farmers who don't source from a single location, nor sell to a single location will be required to chip each animal. This is one advantage this gives the corporate process. Add in the registration process and all the various laws and fees that are sure to accompany the process, and its probably going to place a pretty hefty and disproportionate burden on the small farmer who has only a few critters. (or at least that is their fear) For example a $500 fee to register a property probably wouldn't phase a large corporate operation, but the guy who sells me my eggs and has only a dozen chickens probably isn't going to pony up the $500. Personally I think a good look at many of the large corporations that handle our food, and the type of hardball they can and do play, make Micro$oft look pretty warm and fuzzy.
I got a good laugh at "They don't understand the vastness of" the postage stamps you guys call "cattle ranches" over there.
Australia introduced NLIS a few years ago now, and it is going well. And we have cattle stations larger than Texas.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
And they don't need cellphone masts either. We put wildlife radio tracking collars on marine mammals, for God's sake. This is a well-understood technology with many variants for different applications -- I think we can find a way to use it on cattle in an open landscape.
Besides, the supermarket price of beef is too low anyway. It doesn't properly include beef's carbon or methane costs.
I piss off bigots.
You realize that with an RFID scanner you could scan an entire truckload of cattle without even removing them from the tuck right? All simultaniously? That is how RFID works. And such a scanner would be a couple hundred bucks, tops.
Plus, if you don't like it you can choose not to support the slave industry...
Well, as long as nobody is forced to support it, there isn't a slave industry.
a decent troll. congrats.
cowfax.com - ask your butcher "Show me the CowFax"!
There is no problems with what is fed to cattle. No evidence at all.
So shut up. IN fact, the last few meat problem stems from 'natural' farms.
Yep farming like people used to, and people dying like they use to becasue of it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's hard to think of any industry that likes any increase in costs. They all fight it. Why don't they look to Australia? We already do similar. We have the largest cattle station in the world. It managed to adjust. Plenty of small operations too. They managed. It would be easier for all operators to swallow if some kind of levy is used across the industry. Then your only issue then is imports.
Plus, if you don't like it you can choose not to support the slave industry...
Well, as long as nobody is forced to support it, there isn't a slave industry.
And if the cows weren't forced to support it, there wouldn't be a meat industry either.
Since the USDA is also subsidizing corn, soy, wheat, oats, etc. I don't think it matters that you don't eat one class of food subsidized by the USDA. Vegetarians might not like that the animal meat industry is getting handouts from the USDA, but I'm not all that excited about the USDA making Soy cheaper for Tofu manufacturers so it all comes out in the wash.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
You can take my soylent bacon when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands, you damned dirty ape! - Charlton Heston
Similar to the upcoming US election results
In fact, Large farms are more sustainable on average than small farms due to the economies of scale that come with being a larger operation. Small farms get away with out being regulated because they would be too much work to keep track of. They can pollute to a much greater extent with impunity simply because no one is watching. Large operations OTOH have to file Federal, State, and County paperwork verifying that they are running their business in accordance with envirnomental regulations on all 3 levels.
I agree that this will disproportionately effect small farmers, and that sucks for them. However, these kinds of costs that are proportionately lower on larger farms is the reason that most meat is produced on large farms (not becuase those that run large farms don't care about their animals as far too many idiots believe). Economic forces have cause all animal production industries to move from lots of small farms with only a handful of large operations to mostly large operations with small farms being the exception. As with any industry, if you cannot compete profitably you will be squeezed out.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
The "small rancher" is a myth, just like the "family farm".
On what grounds do you say something so daft? Living in Georgia, I get all of my buffalo meat from a rancher with thirty head of buffalo in exchange for a little computer work every couple of weeks. If he offers beef, sometimes I'll take a little longhorn. Another friend gives me angus by the truckload because his parents have a small farm in Tennessee with a few dozen cattle. I know a lot of people with small active farms and ranches and do not personally know anyone who works for one of the big outfits. When I was a kid, we had a few hundred head of holsteins on our farm and were able to break even with milk sales. The truck came by from farm to farm to farm to fill up at these little dairies. Corporate "farming" may be the mainstay of our food supply, especially in the poultry industry, but please do not be so ignorant about this. The buffalo rancher was breaking even at $2.50/pound for ground bison but with the USDA inspection, he already has to mark it up to $4.00/pound after taking into consideration both inspection and transportation. Any such regulation on cattle does hurt the small man because not only does he not own his own slaughterhouse, but he has to transport his cattle elsewhere and has to deal with a lot more overhead per capita than the corporation.
Besides being one step away from tagging humans--say prisoners guilty of certain crimes--this program would unquestionably harm the many small farms out there.
Spoken like a true stock holder. Bravo.
I'm curious to know how you define a 'corporate farm'. I really hope you don't think that every Xxxx Farms, Inc. is magically part of ADM.
Computers were supposed to bring in the paperless office. Has it? Nope.
The Universal Argument! All possible arguments suggesting further use of databases, tracking, and even computers in general can now be easily and concisely countered by noting that the Paperless Office never arrived! By Jove, Holmes! You've done it again!
AC should make a few nice steaks. I like meat. No, I love meat. AC, marinated in beer for a week, then rolled in egg & milk, some cornmeal breading, then deepfried. Mmmmm - mmmmm!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Of course, I'm just as much of a hypocrite, because I'm more than willing to take the cost savings on assembly-line food (even though sustainable food definitely does taste a lot better and also is healthier).
You seem to be operating under the same false assumption as a lot of people, that somehow Smaller = Sustainable.
If you look at larger farms, the reason that they are more profitable is because they are using less resources per unit of meat produced. Less feed per # of meat or milk means less fossil fuels used planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and mixing the feed. In the case of dairy cattle, it means less cows needed to produce the same volume of milk. Large farms are more profitable becuase they are more sustainable. Feed, which makes up >60% of the total cost of production, is expensive and the less of it you use the more money you make (or in many cases the less money you lose depending on the price being paid at the slaughter house).
Large farms are also held to a higher standard of environmental stewardship. All federal, state, and county regulations have lower cut off limits below which they require less or no documentation for. "Small independant ranchers" would fall into this category. They can run their cows down to a field that has a stream or river running through it and let them defecate and urinate in the water to their hearts content while taking a cooling bath in August (I worked on a dairy farm back in CT where the cows spent the hottest days if the year doing exactly that, and even on cooler days they had to walk across the creek to get to most of the pasture). Large farms are require to keep animals a certain distance away from open water sources and ensure that none of the stored manure ends up contaminating local waters because when the water is tested, they will be the first suspect if it has unacceptably high fecal coliform counts.
My guess is what you are confusing for the taste of sustainability, is actually the taste of "Freshness." The "Factory Farm" is much more an example of misdirection than the "Family Farm." Most large farms are owned by a single family, that run the farm with the help of empolyees. They grew in order to get the economies of scale. The idea of "Factory Farms" was created out of the imagination of vegitarian/vegan activism groups such as HSUS, PETA, ALF, etc. becuase people have this built in prejudice against the combination of "Factories" and "Animals" because factories are thought of as being hard, insensitive, and dangerous.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Why focus on tracking the diseases instead of preventing them? Get rid of industrial feedlots that use animal offal in feed, overcrowding, antibiotics in feed. Double cheeseburgers should probably cost more than $1. Switch to grass-fed range beef.
This has been done in Canada for years. Although it was started with a bar code ear tag with a registration number rather than RFID it allowed a cow to be tracked from birth to market shelf. With RFID in place since 2005 the process is even easier and probably faster. http://www.cbef.com/cattle_identification_system.htm
Regulations like this are made and voted for by people who have no idea how anything in the real world actually works. This is a big reason why despite spending more on health care and education than any other country we are still trailing behind when it comes to both.
his is a big reason why despite spending more on health care and education than any other country we are still trailing behind when it comes to both. Everything including the way the hospital is designed, the grass that's being used on your school lawn, or the way to regulate cattle usually ends up being decided by people in higher positions who have no idea what they're talking about. This not only costs you the tax payer money, you will also have poorer state services because of this.
This reminds me of how California is wanting to put a serial number on every bullet. It sounds like a good idea when you throw logistics and reality out the window which unfortunately people tend to do far too much.
Plus, if you don't like it you can choose not to support the slave industry...
Well, as long as nobody is forced to support it, there isn't a slave industry.
And if the cows weren't forced to support it, there wouldn't be a meat industry either.
I tried to free my cow. She just stood there going "mooo". So I ate her.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If a single individual did what companies routinely do, we would label them a terrorist / dictator / enemy of the state and have them taken out back for a good round of water boarding, put down with both barrels, or both. Hard to water board a stack of papers.
Living in Chile
cause every cow needs its own IP address. And cows don't like NAT. No bull.
Health of cattle eaters should always be placed before the health of the cattle industry.
I grew up on a small cattle farm, so I know what I'm talking about. You absolutely have to sterilize young bulls, or they'll challenge the older bulls, and you'll wind up with a bloody bullpen instead of a lot of happy, complaining cows. So that's 50% of each year's herd you have to spend at least 15 seconds of...intensely personal time with anyway.
Secondly, cows aren't cats, but if one person is herding a small group of cattle then he's doing it through a chute or with a small bucket of feed. Again, this is completely not a problem.
Small cattle ranches obey Sturgeon's Law exactly like any other small groups. They whiners are just complaining because they aren't going to be able to hide downer cows or sell the sick ones before anybody notices. (Which, by the way, is one reason we raised our own, until my brother and I went to college and there was no more farm help.)
If I were still on my parents' farm, I'd welcome this move 100%, even restricted to the 28.8Kbps modem my parents still use.
While there are members of the non-elected government who would like you to believe they oppose this on Libertarian grounds, that is not the case. The permanent government oppose this because it would reveal which cattle are involved in UFO Cattle Mutilations. Perfectly obvious...
This "Tennessee hick" knows what he's talking about!
OK, this is probably too expensive, but maybe for the future: give each cow an RFID chip with a unique identifier. The chip broadcasts its identity over a short distance, and any time the RFID chip detects another chip nearby, it adds it to an internal list. When you find a sick cow, check its list: all those cows are problematic as well. Of course, if some of those cows are out on the range you might not find them right away, but humans who interact with the cows carry detectors with them so that movement can be traced to some degree. (Asking for strict monitoring of location may be difficult, but even sloppy monitoring is better than nothing.)
As to the proposed plan, I don't understand why ranchers would have to scan each cow individually; couldn't the chips be RFID chips and read from a distance. Wouldn't it be enough to get them to walk through some sort of gate, or drive by the herd? I don't really understand RFID but I know people are wrapping their passports in tinfoil because they're afraid of being detected, so it sounds like a human should be able to carry an RFID detector on their belt and have it register the cows automatically.
Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities.
So. Once they're on the truck they ain't going anywhere. Scan them then!
The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database.
Satellite. Cell-based internet. Lame excuse. Business expense that can be (partially) written off.
Have any of you ever looked at the animal chip ID law?
Check out the part for chickens.
You can either chip your chickens *OR* retinal scan them. Yup. $15-$40 a chicken to chip the bird that is only going to be alive for 6-8 weeks as a meat bird, or you can invest $30,000 for a retinal scanner.
And the 'law is the law' so if you normally ordered or got yourself a flock of 50-100 birds so you can freeze them - what makes 'economic sense' when the fine per non-compliant animal is in the thousands?
I'd personally like to see some numbers before making such a claim.
Selective quoting. I had posted that most of the "sustainable ranchers" have moved into niche markets, case in point with bison meat. The concept of a "family farm" or "small rancher" is aggressively being pushed by the large farming corporations to push for more subsidies, water easements, etc. Some of these do trickle down and help the niche markets, but the proportions are skewed (the large farming corporations have a much higher level of relative benefit than the smaller farmers). How much do the small farmers actually push their agenda for favorable local, state, and national law compared to the corporate farmers?
Not everyone lives in an area with readily accessible fresh produce / meat from small farms/ranches, especially once you get into the more heavily urbanized areas. Part of this is from the marginal cost of farmland versus urban development, as well as population density. This has however given rise to markets where people are more than willing to pay the increased premium for non mass-produced agriculture.
Farming has drastically transformed in the US this century, especially in the last 30-50 years, due to a number of factors, including consolidation, technology, and favorable laws. Since 1900, the number of farms have decreased by over 60% and the farm size has increased by over 60%. There are a good number of beneficial laws that directly support small farmers, with the cyclical nature of the business, but there are a large number of laws that disproportionately benefit the large corporate farms also.
The point that I'm trying to make is that corporate farms have been pushing for their agenda under the guise of the small farmer, even if it may inherently harm actual small farmers. I didn't make any comments at all about TFA or it's potential economic impact on small farmers, other than my statement that there actually are very few small farmers that are teetering on the edge of being able to compete.
The troll with karma.
And yet they have the time to brand/ear notch/ear tag cattle. Why not a chip? Also, these chips can read with readers mounted on vaccination boxes, or in loading pens, or in trucks.
Probably, because a chip can remain in the final whole carcass after slaughter, allowing the FDA and others to track where sick cattle are coming from. So if there is evidence that one carcass had mad-cow, they can do a full recall on beef from the ranch.
Chicken is the worst meat to eat, full of all sort, antibiotics, growth hormone, vitamins, everything.
'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.'
Thats like saying
'Eating cattle now, Eating you soon'
If the bovine has done nothing wrong, surely it has nothing to fear from being tracked. After what's the worst that can happen to it?
You mean like...
[ Source: Cows with guns ]
Small and local is the new big.
In Portland Oregon, most of our grocery stores sell locally grown beef that comes from many smaller independent 'free range' cattle ranches. Likewise with vegetables.
The college I work for contracts all their beef from 1-2 organic/free range farmers also. In progressive cities, the trend is very much to support local responsible agriculture and farming.
Across the nation, in terms of bulk fast food, etc.. the mass producers are the mainstay of course, but even fast food is changing.
In Portland, one of our most popular fast food franchises is very progressive, only buying local products, only using wind power, recycling all their waste, offers seasonal food based on what is being harvested, etc...
http://burgerville.com/ (flash site, their only downside:))
'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.'
Soylent Green, anyone?
While I can understand how some might think the preceding comment was a troll, I know many educated and knowledgeable people who are similarly disgusted with our modern meat industry. Just because you disagree doesn't mean the Anon Cowardon was trolling.
Since everyone is talking about sustainability, I'd like to point out that it takes much more water to grow the feed to make a steak than if we ate other things. In terms of the nutritional value/acre, and the impact of the raw materials needed external to that acre, we are way over producing meat. We also eat way too much meat. I'm not suggesting that we just suddenly dump the industry, but it doesn't make any strategic sense. Its really stupid for such a rich, educated nation to act like this. In terms of your slippery slope first domino analogy, there are useful things those people could be doing instead of raising way too much meat. If the change occurred too fast it would be problematic, but no one expects Americans to eat healthier immediately. Lets at least admit its a problem right now, today, and the sort of problem that will become more noticeable in the future as fresh water continues to become less abundant.
Personally I think a good look at many of the large corporations that handle our food, and the type of hardball they can and do play, make Micro$oft look pretty warm and fuzzy.
If a food corporation has done something wrong, they should be held accountable in a court of law. Otherwise, it is really not your concern how they do business. If people in the food industry wanted the government to control how you do your job, I would tell them the same thing.
Mine is Good
What a load of Bullshit. Such electronic tagging has been mandated in many countries for years. My brother and father are both small scale cattle farmers in Australia, electronic tagging if anything has reduced the cost and simplified tracking and stock yard sales, it didn't hurt the industry at all here, if anything it helped it as it removed uncertainty of stock history.
Hey idiot.. it wasnt selective quoting.
Niche market? He was also talking about beef & milk. Nice try but no
This act (NAIS) not only includes cattle, but chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, i.e. _any_ and _all_ farm animals. People have been fighting this act, and trying to raise awareness on it for over a year.
Wherever you go, there you are.
the reason why europe and everyone else banned US beef is because it can't be traced... and it's filled with hormones and steroids which are both banned in europe..
This doesn't disclose the entire story. NAIS involves far more than tracking cattle. It includes tracking horses, sheep, poultry, etc. It involves premises registration, every site where animals are kept must be registered and inspected. Animals that are moved between sites or are commingled with other animals at locations such as auctions, feedlots, fairs, etc. must be tracked. Large producers can get group IDs where they only have to ID lots of animals, small producers must ID every animal. This puts the load of the work on the small/backyard producer and not the large businesses. Big agribusiness has been on board for this. It has the potential to cut competition. The purpose of NAIS is to allow tracking of diseased animals. But first the animal must be identified as diseased. There will be no increase in testing of animals or meat due to NAIS. It will only allow the USDA to go back and find any animals who were associated with the diseased animal throughout it's life. The direction most countries have chosen is to increase inspection on animals and meat to remove the diseased animals from the chain before they are visibly ill and not wait until they have the chance to infect much larger numbers of animals that then have to be tracked back through contact records. From what I have seen this is indeed more about improving the bottom line for large business than the safety of the nation.
- After people DIE, then it becomes a matter for the law - whether civil or criminal. Example: Peanut Corporation of America's failure to follow hygiene and food safety regulations resulted in 23 people dying in 2008.
ARe you willing to die so that I can sue on behalf of your decomposing corpse?
Corporations will lie to increase profits, they will break the law, they will kill people, they will over throw governments. These are facts not the idle speculation of a cynic.
The case of the contaminated peanut butter: that corporation had a history of ignoring regulations and lying about testing results, and being sued for it. Sure, people will likely go to jail and perhaps even be fined, but that isn't going to resurrect the dead. Massive corporations get involved in nefarious things whether this be oil companies, agrochemical companies, finance companies, car companies. The larger and more global the less the members of the company feel responsible for what goes on in someone else's part of the world. The harder it is to hold the perpetrators personally responsible.
SO yes, I want the government to TELL these people how to do their job. What tests to conduct, when to conduct them, where to publish the results for all the world to see. I don't want our food supply blindly trusted to the nefarious whims of greedy, evil people, who hide behind the protection of incorporation articles and skip off to other jurisdictions when the trouble begins.
Any time your job can cause the death or imprisonment of another person, then I expect that you will be held to public standards and that I can look over your shoulder any time I wish to ensure that the job your are doing is correct. That includes programers who write code for say. . . breathalizers, or heart monitoring equipment.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
And this soy isn't used by the meat industry? Come on!
This was specifically designed to hurt mom and pop ranches. The added overhead could seriously cause them to go out of business. Not to mention anyone that wants to own a single cow, goat, sheep, etc. and keep it on their property will be smacked with the same restrictions that the large agri-businesses made up.
Some years ago I met a Canadian company that makes tracking stations that go along with RFID tags and you track disease through the cattle herd on a per animal basis, all the way to after slaughtered and the meat is closely examined. Also they made a cool gadget with a needle to stick in a pig (live I believe) for similar kind of tracking.
Basically this guy told me everyone is just waiting for the other shoe to drop (a la BSE) in the U.S. because of the horrible unregulated state of the herds and the strong meat processing lobby or whatever it is. This is a guy who has tried for years to sell tracking systems to the U.S. and lots of places but only the U.S. never wanted it. Perhaps things have changed slightly since then (maybe 5 years ago) but probably not at all. It makes me think U.S. beef is much more dangerous than people think which is scary to me being American. Of course living in Japan I also remember when Japan halted all beef imports, and how the U.S. suppliers kept shipping spinal cords etc. along in the same batch against the rules. Harsh to say it but all this makes the U.S. food supply sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
I have no idea if this has anything to do with the story, hopefully it will just provide an anecdotal counterbias to the meat lobby spin, the dept of agriculture spin and the large corporate farm spin and the tiny farm spin.
Waiter, there is a microchip in my T-bone.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
SurvivalBlog.com ©2006 James Wesley, Rawles
Note: Permission to reprint, repost or forward the following article in full is granted, but only if it is not edited or excerpted.
From the Editors of www.SurvivalBlog.com:
The National Animal Identification System (NAIS)
The USDA and the Agrobiz giants have been crafting a national animal identification scheme that threatens the traditional freedom of self sufficiency, the privacy of Americans, and the livelihood of organic farmers, and family farms. The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is the creation of the Agrobiz giants Monsanto, Cargill Meat, National Pork Producers, and others to monopolize American food production using fear tactics to advance their agenda. The NAIS scheme was not created by any act of congress. Rather, it is merely a presumptuous bureaucratic dictate.
The NAIS plan requires two types of mandatory registration for everyone who owns even just one "livestock" animal. Every person who owns even just one horse, donkey, chicken, pigeon, goat, llama, sheep, pig, cow, alpaca, duck, farmed fish, etc. must register their name, home address, telephone number and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of their home in a Federal database. Secondly, in order for any animal to leave its birth farm, the owner will be required to obtain a Federal ID number for it which will be kept in a national data base and have the animal biochipped. Animals will have to be registered if they leave the farm for any reason; to go on a trail ride, to go to a show or fair, to be bought or sold, to be bred by a stud on another farm, or to be taken to the local butcher, or anywhere else. The most likely type of ID will be a bio-microchip containing a low power radio transmitter so that the chips can be read from a distance. NAIS would allow "industry" to decide if retinal scans and DNA samples would also be required. Of course large scale Agrobiz has exempted itself from individual identification. (Agrobiz producers will be allowed to use one ID number for groups of hundreds or even thousands of animals that are raised and processed together.)
Americans will be required to report every time an animal enters or leaves their property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if an animal is missing. Such events must be reported in 24 hours or owners would suffer an as yet unspecified penalty. Small family farms and organic farmers will be driven out of business by the costs of premises registration fees, individual animal ID fees, event reporting fees, electronic tags or chips, electronic readers, home computers, Internet access, phone service, and reporting software. According to the USDA's plan all of these costs will be born by the animal owners.
NAIS might enhance Agrobiz's export markets and allow tracing of animal movements to track disease outbreaks which is its stated goal. But it will not make the American consumer safer. The most common type of meat contamination in the United States is bacterial, such as E coli. and Listeria. It is not discovered until masses of people become ill. Since Agrobiz processes meat in huge packing plants with thousands of animals being slaughtered a day, NAIS is useless to determine if the contamination was from one animal, multiple animals, or unsanitary conditions at the packing plant itself. Contaminated meat from giant Agrobiz processor is sent to all 50 states endangering millions of consumers simultaneously. On the other hand family farms, organic farmers, and private citizens their animals in natural and healthy conditions because they are raising their animals for themselves and their neighbors' tables. When they are driven out of the market, America's food supply will become less safe not more so. The consolidation of America's food supply by Agrobiz makes it more vulnerable to terrorists. As Americas meat industry becomes a giant monopoly where all meat is processed in a few giant packing plants then it becomes easier fo
That's a good point, although you seem to take it for granted that we can't keep eating this much meat. Is that a sure thing? Inefficient maybe, but eliminating inefficiency for it's own sake isn't something I'm willing to give up hamburgers for.
A relative had a business idea involving RFIDs and cows. Being the only geek he knew, I helped by doing some research.
#1 - RFID sucks.
So many implementations, each with its own pitfalls. Interoperability doesn't exist. The supporting infrastructure is a much bigger concern than the cost per tag.
At the time, RFID enthusiasts were excited that Wal-Mart was forcing their suppliers to adopt RFID. I deduced that this was just another way for Wal-Mart to steal from their suppliers by offloading their overhead costs. Wal-Mart was just using RFID as the truncheon. I was right.
I assume that this push to adopt RFID is just someone's scam to line their own pockets.
#2 - Ear Tags break
It's true that ear tags have some reliability problems. They break, fall off, get torn out (ouch).
But RFID fails too. I didn't dig enough to learn the comparative failure rates.
#3 - Bar Codes are better than RFID
It's my opinion, just based on a hunch, that bar codes are better suited than RFID for inventory applications. RFIDs fail silently. Bar codes can be visually inspected. Bar codes are cheaper, more versatile, etc.
#4 - RFID thresholds, not hand scanners
Some of the comments mention the cost of hand scanners. That's not how it's done. You set up a threshold and pass the cows through it. Kind of like the anti-theft thresholds used in retail.
I'm a cow.
Q: What do you call a group of untagged cattle?
A: Anonymous cow herd.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Never said it wasn't. Just pointing out the idiocy of claiming that only the animal protein industries are subsidized by the government.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
And here is the problem! I sympathize with exactly this statement because it's why I don't sell eggs. You want freshly laid eggs? Ask me and I'll just give them to you because the regulatory compliance overhead of selling them isn't worth it to me to make a few bucks. Even though it would be nice to break even on the cost of feed & materials.
As far as NAIS, I haven't been keeping track recently. I got sick enough reading the original drafts! We have horses and chickens. I just gave a rooster away to someone who wanted to breed chickens. Under the full NAIS, I would be expected to record the movement of that animal, even though it's going to a farm where it will probably stay until it dies.
Under NAIS, if my wife decides to go for a quick after-dinner ride to the end of the road (about 3-4 miles round trip), she is required to file an animal movement document with the USDA because the horse left our property. For a fscking joy ride down the road! Same goes if it's a trail ride, except then you also have to report the ID numbers of the horses your horse was in company with. This shit is so stupid it's insane. Whatever good intentions they may have had are totally lost in the stupidity of the implementation!
I can only hope they come to their senses before NAIS is fully implemented. Go visit these guys: http://www.nonais.org/
Hurting and killing people is already against the law. Regulations do not change that.
All regulations do is substitute the will of the bureaucrat for the mind of the individual, at the point of a gun.
No company can succeed by hurting or killing people - unless of course the government, itself, is propping that company up - telling everybody not to worry about where food comes from, not to think about the reputation of companies, just feel free to buy anything from anywhere and feel secure that the government controls everything for the better.
Mine is Good