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.'"

Comments

Regulation

[ShakaUVM]

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.

Re:Regulation

[crmarvin42]

Ok, where to start. Before addressing individual points. Anyone that uses words like "Poisonous Air" and "Super-incubators for viruses" is spreading FUD. No two ways about it. They have a political agenda, whether they admit it or not, and are obviously biased. The fact that you either were unwilling, unable to see that bias is rather frightening, but not uncommon. Now for your individual points.

Nutritionists can tell you (in fact one is right now) that the feeding of animal byproducts to other animals is routine. Dog food contains meat, as does chicken, and the meat in question is not the top cuts I can assure you. The cattle got BSE from eating rendered sheep byproducts, not other cattle. Sheep have a prion disease know as Scrapie, which in the >200 years that we've known about it has never before jumped from one species to another. In fact, disease transmission by protein, as opposed to bacteria, virus, or fungi was only discovered with the isolation of the prion protein involved in both diseases. This discovery was as almost as revolutionary as germ theory itself. You cannot reasonably expect people to predict that which has never happened before will suddenly happen.

There is no "Flu epidemic" in north america. The flu occasionally affects some herds, but in the 7 years I've been working where I have, we've only seen the flu once. It was not the "Swine Flu" that the media was losing their mind about either, it was H5N4 IIRC. AFAIK, there hasn't been a single case of the so called "Swine Flu" (ie H1N1) in any pigs north of the US, Mexican border. The disease was transmitted out of Mexico by Human-to-human contact. Honestly, how many people do you really believe bring their pigs with them when they travel to Europe, Australia and Asia when leaving Mexico?

Also, if barns were as bad as your obviously biased reference states, then the first farmer to turn on the god damn FAN would seen incredible improvements in health and production and put the rest of the industry out of business nearly over night. Pigs are mammals, just like us. If they cannot breathe or are surrounded by toxins all the time, then they won't grow. They'll end up dying before they get to market, and no one will make any money. Why people such as yourself are willing to believe that animals will somehow grow in conditions that are toxic to them is beyond me. Do you not understand basic fucking biology? If you'd ever have taken a swine management class (as I have) you'd know just how much time is devoted to teach how to calculate the necessary air exchange rates based on season, flooring style, square feet/pig and building style. We had a whole exam on that.

And before you go trotting out the old "Antibiotics" meme, stop right there. The only place I've seen antibiotics fed to pigs on a routine basis is in the weaning barn. weaning is very stressful for pigs, they are moving from a mostly sterile, liquid diet with highly digestible proteins and energy derived primarily from lipids to a diet that is no more sterile than the grass in your back yard, solid, containing a fair amount of indigestible proteins, and with energy derived primarily from carbohydrates. This causes the animal to switch both his internal digestive mechanisms, and deal with a sudden switch in the enteral bacteria colonizing the small and large intestine. All the antibiotics do is knock down the bad bugs long enough for him to make the transition smoothly and then are removed from the diet. Antibiotics are expensive and a small, sub-therapeutic does in the weanling diets will often prevent the need to use much larger therapeutic doses for a much longer period of time if the E. coli gets away from them and causes an outbreak of scours (diarrhea). Prior to the use of antibiotics in weanling diets, losses at this point were much higher than they are now, in fact we've never had higher weaning percentages before.

The USDA has NEVER labeled pigs that eat pigs as safe. The reason is Trichin

Re:Let it collapse

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Tracking

[j. andrew rogers]

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.

You assume far too much, out in the western US ranch country there is usually no communication services of any kind. I have a small (a few square kilometers) ranch in Nevada that is 20 miles from the next ranch (never mind a road), typical for western ranching operations. I get cellular reception -- one bar -- if I climb to the peak of the adjacent mountain, that several thousand extra feet gives me line-of-sight to an area near an Interstate highway 30-40 miles away.

There seems to be a presumption (1) that western ranches are the size of hobby farms, (2) that they are located anywhere near infrastructure, and (3) that free-range cattle is a tidy local pasture-and-barn affair instead of a horseback operation in remote canyons. In many parts of the western ranching areas, you don't even locate all of your cattle for the better part of a year.

Re:Sigh.

[j. andrew rogers]

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."

I call BS on your BS. If we were talking about corporate feed lots it would be one thing, but a very significant percentage of the US beef herd is raised by independent cattle producers on open range in very sparsely populated country. It can take months to find all of your cattle to tag them in the first place, so it is very easy to "lose" cattle without noticing. In fact, the law in the ranching areas I am familiar with is that you only have rights to your free-range cattle if you can find and tag them within the first year after birth, after which they enter the public domain (first person to tag them owns them). It is not at all uncommon for me to find a rancher's untagged cattle in one of my canyons.

Beef ranching in the western US does not work the way you think it does. Much of the basic logistics of it have not changed much since the 19th century.

Pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

(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.

Re:Let it collapse

[parasonic]

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.