NOFA/Mass Initiative on NAIS

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Why Do Sustainable Farmers & Consumers Oppose Animal Tracking?

Why Do Sustainable Farmers & Consumers Oppose
Animal Tracking?

What is Animal Tracking?

Animal tracking is an information management system that would enable a central authority to monitor the whereabouts of all livestock in the country. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has proposed implementing such a system to manage animal diseases. Called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), it has three components.

1) Premises registration records farms, factories, slaughterhouses, and homes where even a single livestock animal ever visits, identifying them in a central registry by owner, address, phone number, global positioning satellite coordinates and a 7-digit premises ID number.

2) Animal identification would tag each animal with a unique 15 digit federal ID number - most likely via an implanted radio-frequency identification device (RFID) that can be read at a distance.

3) Animal tracking would provide updates within 48 hours on each animal's birth, movements on or off any premises, tagging events (application, loss, replacement) and slaughter. This would be compiled in a database that is supposed to be able to tell where and when each animal was born, who bought it, where they took it, when it saw a vet, and where it went for slaughter.

What Problems is Tracking Supposed to Solve?

Animal diseases like avian influenza (AI) or mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE), and food borne illnesses can affect human health. By tracking animals, USDA and industry groups argue, they can contain these diseases.

Avian Influenza (AI) in the highly virulent strains we know today was first discovered in 1997 in Southeast Asia. Rapid concentration of poultry and pig factory farms has decisively heightened recent AI outbreaks.

Mad Cow (BSE) is a disease transmitted through a factory farm practice called rendering in which bits from animal carcasses are made into animal feed for cheap weight gain. Since the rogue proteins (prions) that cause BSE remain active in animal tissue long after slaughter, rendered feed spreads BSE.

Food Borne Illnesses, like Salmonella and E. coli, are transmitted by eating contaminated meat or animal products. They result in 600 and 60 deaths per year, respectively, in the U.S. and they can be avoided through reasonable home sanitation and by thoroughly cooking food.

Where Do These Emerging Diseases Come From?

Like all living creatures, both pathogens and the immune systems of vulnerable organisms evolve according to their environments. The primary public health challenge, therefore, is to minimize the chances of new diseases evolving and maximize the development of strong immune systems in livestock.

Environments in which populations are low-density and dispersed, such as flocks of wild birds or backyard chickens, are not easy targets for disease. If a virus does mutate into a pathogenic form in these circumstances, it kills nearby hosts and then dies out. The viruses that tend to survive are the ones that remain low-pathogenic and are not fatal. Factory farm environments, however, provide ideal conditions for pathogens. They are warm and moist, crowded with many genetically identical hosts, and devoid of healthy soil, sunlight and fresh air. Fatal pathogenic agents in this environment can spread rapidly. But these unprecedented, unhealthy conditions have only come into being recently.

Are Factory Animal Farms Here to Stay?

The factory farms that industry has thrown up around the globe not only create major health and environmental problems, they cannot be sustained.

Manure Disposal - Millions of animals in one place can produce tens of millions of pounds of manure a day. In small quantities, manure is a fertilizer, but on a massive scale it becomes a pollutant.

Water Consumption - Producing a pound of beef under factory conditions can require as much as 1350 gallons of water. This depletes reservoirs (like the Midwest's Ogallala aquifer), making pumping costs exorbitant.

Antibiotic Use - Factory farms routinely feed low levels of antibiotics to promote growth, fostering antibiotic resistant pathogens. The medical profession is becoming alarmed over the resulting loss of antibiotic efficacy in humans.

Genetic Uniformity - Competitive economic pressures lead to replacing traditional breeds with animals bred for maximum weight gain. This depletes genetic diversity, which is necessary for food security. When conditions change, old breeds may have the needed traits to survive that have been bred out of newer varieties.

Energy Use - Animal confinement operations require fossil fuels for virtually every aspect of production. By contrast, pastured settings rely on the local ecology for food, manure cycling, and ventilation. Small scale also enables local distribution. Increasing fuel prices will make it necessary to transition to local pasture-based husbandry.

Why Wont Tracking Work to Solve Disease Threats?

Tracking addresses the symptoms -- not the cause -- of modern disease threats. It distracts from the need for a fundamental change in how factory farms raise and process livestock.

Avian influenza spreads too quickly for tracking to detect. Prevention through sustainable husbandry and cooperation at the local level are the best solutions.

Mad cow can be detected through an inexpensive lab test. Proper feeding of cows, and testing them for BSE upon slaughter before the meat reaches the market, as is done in Europe and Japan, would be simpler and more effective than tracking every cow for life.

Food-borne illnesses come from meat that was contaminated, oftentimes during high speed slaughterhouse processing. NAIS won't help because tracking ends when animals reach the slaughterhouse. A real solution is better slaughter procedures, plus normal sanitation in food preparation.

Is NAIS Voluntary?

NAIS was first proposed as a mandatory program because the USDA said it would not work without 100% participation. NAIS has met with a firestorm of opposition at the grassroots, however, and in November 2006 the USDA announced NAIS would be "voluntary at the national level." There are several reasons to doubt that it will remain so, however. For one, the USDA continues to assert that it can make the program mandatory whenever it wishes. For another, the USDA has insisted that without 100% compliance NAIS can't work. Finally, ID numbers used in other programs like scrapie and brucellosis management can be replaced with NAIS ID numbers, forcing the farm into premises registration.

Meanwhile, state departments of agriculture all over the country have been initiating premises registration programs (including some that are mandatory at the state level), and some states have begun implementing animal identification.

NAIS Would Hurt Small Farmers

Whether mandatory or voluntary, NAIS would be ineffective in preventing animal disease and would create problems for small farmers.

Coercion - Participation in NAIS could become necessary in order to do regular business in animal husbandry. A December 2006 AP report quoted USDA spokesman Ben Kaczmarski saying that in some cases premise registration will become a prerequisite to doing business.

Costs - Participating would be prohibitive for small farmers, who would have to identify their animals individually. NAIS allows factory farms to avoid these costs by tagging livestock in large groups, but only if they stay together throughout the animals' entire life cycle - a feature of production common at factory farms but not at small farms. With costs for tags, tag readers, reporting software, and labor to set up and maintain a reporting system, for many small farmers NAIS could be the last straw.

Pressure to confine animals - Authorities have reacted to outbreaks of avian flu by erroneously concluding that migratory birds are spreading the virus and outlawing backyard poultry. Premises registration will identify locations where animals are still raised on pasture, and will give nervous public health officials an obvious, although misplaced, target.

NAIS Would Hurt Consumers

Many consumers now seek out local, small scale, and organic food because they believe the way it is raised is healthier for them and their families. To the extent that suppliers of this food are driven from business by the pressure to conform to national animal tracking and to abandon pastured flocks, consumers will have only the mass-produced factory-farmed food left to buy.

What Can I Do to Help?

As a livestock owner, you should not participate in any so-called "voluntary" state or federal program to register farms or animals. The USDA is using farmers' supposed willingness to enter such voluntary programs as a justification for NAIS. Contact your breed association or other farming interest group and ask them to write to officials to oppose NAIS.

As an individual, you can educate your neighbors by hosting a NOFA/Mass speaker on NAIS, or by writing a letter to your local paper. Contact state and federal legislators to express your opinion on NAIS. Personal letters, Emails and phone calls all work. You can find contact information for officials at our website.

As a consumer, patronize farmers who raise meat, milk and eggs in a way you support.

[Revised January 2007]

NAIS - News from NOFA/Massachusetts

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National Animal ID Program Backstops Agribusiness
While Small-Farm System Offers Real Disease Answers
Ben Grosscup
NOFA NAIS Response Coordinator

The USDA is starting to implement an animal and premises surveillance system called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The program would put a radio frequency identification [RFID] tracking tag on all domestic livestock animals and record their movements in a centralized database. The USDAs justification for this system is to protect the public from what it calls foreign animal disease threats like mad cow, hoof and mouth, and bird flu. (www.usda.gov/nais)

These are real threats, but NAIS promoters are manipulating legitimate concerns to scare farmers and homesteaders into complying with a misguided system. This new program would make small farming less economic and reinforce the very industrial agriculture whose factory farms most exacerbate harmful disease mutations and outbreaks. Worst of all, the ones that will be hit hardest are not the cause of these new disease threats: small and sustainable farms are the most hopeful solution to the very problems NAIS claims to solve.

On April 25, 2005 the USDA released its NAIS Draft Program Standards (hereafter Standards), specifying a phased-in implementation that starts voluntary and then becomes mandatory. In that draft, premises registration would be mandatory by January 2008 and tagging all livestock animals would be mandatory by January 2009. The catchwordsvoluntary and mandatorytake sorting out.

New Rhetoric of Voluntary

The Standards quickly attracted a storm of opposition (http://nonais.org/). Nine months after their publication, the USDA backpedaled, proving that opposition can be effective. On Jan. 20, 2006, Neil Hammerschmidt, the USDAs NAIS coordinator, addressed a meeting of R-CALF USA, which represents cattle producers and opposes the Standards: Today there is no one working on rules to implement a mandatory program. We want to see what we can accomplish [on a voluntary basis] through market incentives, and we want to see what the market desires (USDA backs off on centralized database and mandatory ID, Tam Moore, Capital Press Agriculture Weekly 27 Jan 2006). Hammerschmidt downplayed the draconian provisions as merely a draft.

The rhetorical change, however, has not stopped the USDA from quickly inaugurating the NAIS at the state level. As environmental reporter for Grist Magazine, Amanda Griscom Little, reports, The USDAwill likely leave to state officials decisions about whether to make the program voluntary or mandatory Neil Hammerschmidt, said [to R-CALF] USDA isnt sure whether it has the authority to impose a federally mandated program that requires producers to report to a private entity.

In the meantime, states are moving on their own to put the animal-tracking system in place. Minnesota and Wisconsin have approved measures that make stage one [animal premises registration] of the NAIS program mandatoryand Maine, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont, and Washington are considering similar legislation. (Old Big Brother Had a Farm 10 Mar 2006, http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2006/03/10/griscom-little/). So, voluntary at the federal level means that state ag. departments will be charged with implementing the NAIS, and as Griscom reports, the USDA has already allocated over $60 million to them to do it.

Market Wont Necessarily Be Kind

But even if the system were to remain voluntary, many concerns would remain. NAIS could encroach on farmers rights without necessarily commandeering their animals and enforcing fines. When Hammerschmidt suggests following what the market desires, we must ask who are the most powerful actors in the market, and what agricultural models do they promote?

Even if NAIS remains officially voluntary, strong trends throughout the livestock industry to adopt it could drastically change the farm economy. Distributors could start requiring animals to be RFID-tagged. Consider the influence the retail giant, Wal-Mart, exerts over entire industries when they exact new product qualifications. At the same time the USDA and meat industry are pushing animal-RFID tagging, Wal-Mart is starting to require its biggest suppliers to tag shipments to some of its distribution centers with [RFID tags] that would eventually let Wal-Mart track every item that it sells. (What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers Habits, Constance Hays, New York Times 14 Nov 2004, New York Times Article). Not only governments but corporations too have enormous power to change entire industries.

These animal diseases should not be thought of as necessarily foreign. This idea plays on outmoded national prejudices, but it shapes federal policy. U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary, Chuck Conner, described the USDAs strategy to deal with the global threat of bird flu: Attacking the disease at its source overseas is a main focusWe also have strict importation restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus in our country and an elaborate surveillance system in place to monitor our bird populations. (Measures to counter avian flu issued by USDA, Agrinews 26 Nov 2005, http://www.agrinewspubs.com/Main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=207&ArticleID=9400).

But you cant attack animal diseases somewhere else, build a wall around your own country, and expect to be safe. Viruses know no borders; they replicate, mutate, and spread based on immediate conditions. The most conducive places for viral pestilence are factory farms, which are spreading worldwide, devouring landscapes from Arkansas to Vietnams Mekong River Delta.

Various influenza strains have been endemic in bird populations for thousands of years, but they typically remain benign unless they have an easy opportunity to mutate into pathogenic forms. As the Canada-based Beyond Factory Farming Coalition summarizes: In a low-density, dispersed population, such as flocks of wild birds or backyard chickens, a virus can only survive as a low pathogenic agent. If a virus happens to mutate into a highly pathogenic form in these circumstances, it quickly dies out, as it kills all available hosts.

However in a factory farm situation, perfect conditions exist for a virus to mutate from a low pathogenic to a high pathogenic form. Thousands of hosts (chickens) with near identical genetic makeup, all the same age and size, crowded in close conditions, allow a virus to kill its host, and move onto the next victim with great speed and ease. And as public health experts warn, these viral mutations can confer not only greater pathogenicity, but also human transmissibility, posing dangers of a deadly pandemic.

As the reputable farmers rights organization, GRAIN, concludes in its February 2006 report, Fowl play: If bird flu is as serious as the [World Health Organization] says it is, if millions of people could potentially die from an H5N1 pandemic, then how is it that [the poultry] industry continues to operate with so little oversight and so much impunity and support from governments? What people really need is adequate and enforced protection from the transnational poultry industry. This will take strong and concerted pressure from civil society, to cut through the hype and hysteria, stand up for small-scale farmers and backyard poultry and start building food systems that put people before profits (see link under "Resources").

Why They Want NAIS

The NAIS is designed to prop up a fundamentally unsustainable industrial agriculture system and increase global dependence on it even as it fails farmers and consumers the world over. Meat-importing countries quickly halt purchases from countries where mad-cow or bird flu are widely reported. Far from rethinking its disease-prone production model, the meat industry mainly tries to protect its export markets. Unfortunately, the U.S. is not alone in implementing animal tracking regimes. Similarly invested in foreign markets, Australia, Brazil, and Canada are clamoring to implement animal ID.

Reflecting the meat industrys urgent desire for NAIS, Mark Dopp, counsel to the American Meat Institute, called the USDAs recent backpedaling on mandatory national animal ID disturbing: Our position is that mandatory is needed, and its up to USDA to figure out how to get there All it takes is one incident involving an animal thats not identified to disrupt meat exports (USDA remarks on animal ID trigger confusion, anger, Food Traceability Report, March 2006). But the meat industry talk about protecting its export markets means putting profits ahead of small farmers and public health.

Farmers Should Not Volunteer for This

If the USDAs Standards are any indication of whats to come, there will be a two-tiered implementation of NAIS that encourages massive-scale to the detriment of human-scale farming. Large industrial operations will more easily incorporate a tracking system by making just one ID tag for each group of animals kept together for all stages of the mechanized production process. By contrast, small farmers would be required to tag each individual animal, a financial burden the USDA says will befall the farmer. Furthermore, NAIS traces animals back to their farm of origin, not forward to the consumers. Thus, NAIS increases farmer liability risk and cost without providing consumer benefits or dealing with the main culprit of these new disease threats: factory farming.

The USDA wants farmers to volunteer for the new NAIS program, but that means volunteering away the right to raise animals without government interference. If we stand up together and say no to the NAIS and the industrial system it serves, we can protect small farms and affirm the potential of sustainable agriculture to help transform the ecology of rural and urban communities for the better.

To get involved with the ongoing work of NOFA/Mass on NAIS, contact Ben Grosscup, ben.grosscup@nofam0.org, 413 658-5374.

Resources on NAIS

APHIS (USDA) NAIS Homepage
(Find the infamous "Draft Program Standards" that gained the ire of many farmers.) www.usda.gov/nais

Comments on NAIS "Draft Program Standards" and "Draft Strategic Plan"
Mary Zanoni, Feb 6, 2006 (A leading voice for a sustainable agriculture message on NAIS)

NoNAIS.org: Protect Traditional Rights to Farm
(A blog that tracks opposition to NAIS) http://nonais.org/

Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
(Leading the fight against NAIS in TX) www.tofga.org

Fowl play: The Poultry Industry's Central Role in the Bird Flu Crisis'. GRAIN, February 2006.
(Puts recent bird flu events globally in political, economic, and scientific context) www.grain.org

Fact Sheet: Control Bird Flu by Controlling Intensive Poultry Operations
(A Canadian farmers' rights group's leaflet on factory farm hazards) www.beyondfactoryfarming.org

The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis. September 15, 2005.
(A book on the imminent public health danger of bird flu, which has arisen from factory farms)

This page was last modified on January 20, 2008 at 9:12:49 AM.