Hey NYT: WTF?

by: Jill Richardson

Fri Feb 05, 2010 at 14:12:05 PM PST

"It was just overwhelming in the country that people didn't like it, and I think they took that feedback to heart," said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which had opposed the identification system. "I think it's good they've at least said we're going to do something different."

Umm... no. The American Farm Bureau helped develop NAIS and originally supported making the program mandatory for anyone who owned any of a long list of animals, even if the animal was just a pet (like a pot-bellied pig or a horse). The defeat of NAIS is entirely thanks to grassroots outrage, opposition, and plain old refusal to comply NO MATTER WHAT. That opposition stalled the USDA long enough that Congress eventually yanked some of NAIS's funding because the USDA was essentially just wasting all of its NAIS funding, trying to get the program in place and utterly failing. When Vilsack came into office, he set up "listening sessions" about NAIS all over the country. The attendance at those listening sessions was overwhelmingly anti-NAIS.

The listening session transcripts are no longer up on the USDA's site (as best I can tell) but fortunately, Google never forgets anything :) Below, I've posted a quote by the Farm Bureau at one of the listening sessions, followed by a quote by a farmer that is more typical of what was heard at these listening sessions.  

My name is Mark Haney, and I'm president of Kentucky Farm Bureau. We are the largest farm organization in Kentucky, and we represent over 470,000 member families. We have the largest cattle herd east of the Mississippi River, and certainly the livestock industry is extremely important to the farm economy here in Kentucky. We support the establishment and implementation of an effective National Animal ID System because of the impact it would bring to overall herd health that will further build consumer confidence in our product. We do not speak to the issue in our state policy of mandatory versus voluntary, but we do support a system... We believe and support development of adoption of a livestock identification, and we support the establishment and implementation of a national animal system with a 48-hour traceback capability.

Another public comment made at the Louisville listening session:

My name is Adam Barr, and I am a farmer in Meade County, Kentucky. We raise beef cattle, poultry, and vegetables for sale locally in the Louisville area. I'm also president of Community Farm Alliance. We're a 2000 member grassroots organization dedicated to preserving the family farm as an economically viable livelihood. We also count on a lot of consumer members and a growing trend towards a local food economy, which we call L.I.F.E. - a Local Integrated Food Economy.

So underlying premise of these hearings today is that there is some kind of NAIS is going to be instated. I just want to be clear. We at CFA are definitely against NAIS in any form. Part of the reason is that NAIS is an undue burden for family farmers. There's a big difference between farmers who produce for export and farmers who raise food to be sold locally. NAIS requires farmers in the local food economy to tag and track all their animals while confined animal feeding operations get one tag for thousands of animals. NAIS is clearly stacked in favor of those industrialized farmers that need NAIS to keep their export markets open. But the system will put animal producers in local markets out of business and help to destroy a growing local food movement. So corporate farms profit and family farmers lose.

The second issue is one of liability. NAIS starts at the farm and ends at the slaughterhouse. The majority of food-borne illness starts in industrial slaughter facilities where thousands of animals are processed at one time. With NAIS, these food-borne illnesses could be tracked back to the farmer. Clearly this program shifts responsibility away from the broken federal health inspection system and onto the farmer, who is not responsible, ultimately, for food-borne illness.

So now I want to address an issue that Mark Haney brought up, and that's consumer confidence in our food supply. With recent disease outbreaks in our food supply, something clearly must be done to improve the safety of our food. NAIS is NOT the answer because it destroys family farms, who are producing the healthiest food available. Family farmers are willing to sit down and develop a food safety alternative to NAIS, but the current program as it is is cumbersome, costly, and will do nothing to prevent animal disease or improve safety.

NAIS needs to be scrapped and we need to start over. The new program should look at industrial food production, which is the source of animal disease and food-borne illness. A clear distinction should be made between factory farms and those pasture-based family farms. Industrial ag may need this program. We should let them have it. Small-scale producers for a local market do not need this program, and if it moves forward, we would like full exemption for these producers.