Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Animal ID plan angers some farmers
Updated 10/27/2006 12:13 AM ET
By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-26-animal-id_x.htm

SWOOPE, Va. — A thousand turkeys, 500 cattle, 300 pigs, 1,900 chickens
and four generations of the Salatin family share the grassland on this
550-acre farm in the Shenandoah Mountains.

Now, Joel Salatin is worried the government will make it impossible for his
25-year-old son and his two young grandsons to keep the family business
going for the generations to come.

He has joined a growing national grass-roots movement against an ambitious
new government disease-fighting program that asks every farm in the nation
register its animals. The aim of the program, called the National Animal
Identification System (NAIS), is to make it easier to track down animals
during a disease outbreak that threatens humans and livestock.

Salatin calls the system "foolishness" that will put an unnecessary
financial burden on family farms and won't do a thing to stop the spread of
contagious livestock and poultry diseases.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it an integral part of its effort
to protect against the devastating health and economic consequences that
could follow foot-and-mouth, avian influenza or any number of other
barnyard maladies.

Already, the Agriculture Department has backed off plans to make the
program mandatory. For now, at least, officials are stressing that it's
voluntary. Salatin and other opponents worry the government will reverse
course, or that slaughterhouses eventually will believe it's in their best
interest to accept only tagged animals, in effect forcing farmers to
comply.

Under the government's plan, big livestock producers, backyard farmers and
certain animal owners are being asked first to register their property with
state officials. That means they provide their name, address and phone
number and are entered in a database with a seven-digit "premises ID
number."

Then animals would be tagged — in most cases with microchips containing
radio-frequency IDs that can be read with a scanner — so that they can be
found during an outbreak.

The goal of animal identification is to be able to stop the spread of
disease within 48 hours by identifying which animals are affected, where
they've been and what other animals they might have come into recent
contact with — whether at a breeder's farm or a county fair.

Once potentially affected animals are found and identified, state
veterinarians would be able to inoculate them, quarantine them or do
whatever would be necessary to stop the spread.

Registration and tagging are "vital in a disease outbreak," says John
Clifford, who is running the program for the Agriculture Department.

Opponents begin Internet movement

Untold numbers of animal owners disagree and their passion against the
program is fueled on websites such as non-ais.org, stopanimalid.org and
noanimalid.com, as well as in publications such as Countryside and Small
Stock Journal.

The anger stems partly from the notion that big producers want the program
in place to restore their credibility with a public increasingly concerned
about tainted food and to protect producers' economic interests against
bans on exports of U.S. beef.

"This is a way to placate the masses," says Salatin, who describes himself
as a libertarian Christian environmentalist and runs his unusual "beyond
organic" Polyface Farm without chemicals and big machinery, the trappings
of most modern beef, pig and poultry operations.

"If the (government) really wanted to protect against disease, they ought
to shut down all the industrial, fecal, inhumane, concentration camp
factories" where animals are bred for slaughter, Salatin says.

Salatin and other farmers worry that food prices will rise and they'll be
driven out of business by the program, which is generally supported by big
industry as a way to guard against an outbreak such as the one that hit
Great Britain in 2001 when foot-and-mouth disease swept through livestock
farms.

USDA to begin education program

Clifford says the USDA this fall will begin an education campaign to try to
convince farmers to go along with premises registration. He says a lot of
the opposition to the program is based on "misinformation" on the Internet,
including that every chicken would need an ID under its skin and that every
time someone took their horse out for a trail ride, they'd have to call the
state. Neither is true, he says.

Mary Zanoni, a Canton, N.Y., lawyer who has written extensively about NAIS,
says it's designed "to absolutely discourage people from the individual
small-scale ownership of any livestock." It represents, she says, "nothing
less than the final divorce between man and nature."

No one knows how high passions are running on the issue better than Maine
state veterinarian Don Hoenig. A proponent of the program, Hoenig had held
dozens of town hall-style meetings around his state explaining the program
and preaching its benefits.

"Major diseases like avian influenza and foot-and-mouth can really affect,
in a significant way, the economy of a country," Hoenig says. "So the
quicker we can get the situation under control and stop the spread, the
quicker our food production systems — our producers — can get back to
business. That's the bottom line."

In April, at a meeting in Ellsworth, Maine, attended by about 80 farmers,
the questions were "99% hostile," Hoenig says. Two people wearing masks
burst into the room near the end of the meeting, screamed, "No animal ID!"
and hurled horse-manure pies at Hoenig. The manure, on aluminum pie plates
with graham-cracker crusts and Oreo cookies sprinkled on top, hit Hoenig in
the back. "It was so disturbing and violent," he says.

As for arguments that the program is unconstitutional and a violation of
privacy, "I can't counter that," Hoenig says. But he tells the farmers, "In
an emergency, you're going to be coming to people like me for help. So give
us the tools we need to do our job."
Posted 10/26/2006 11:00 PM ET
Updated 10/27/2006 12:13 AM ET