Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

They make it sound like these farmers are tinfoil-hat nutcases. Joel and
others are portrayed as reacting emotionally - "angry" - instead of
rational businessmen with good reason to be concerned about their survival.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 10/31/2006 at 9:02 AM TradingPostPaul wrote:

>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
>
>
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