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Animal ID
Big Issue For Small
Producers In Northeast States
By David Bowser
CANTON, New
York — Mary Zanoni is not a big rancher. She has 11 animals on 25
acres in upstate New York. She has five head of cattle, seven
chickens, two cats, a dog and a cockatiel.
She is not
happy with the idea of a National Animal Identification System.
"In April
2005, when USDA released the draft strategic plan," Zanoni says, "I
saw a small article in Lancaster Farming that mentioned it,
so I downloaded it and read it."
Lancaster
Farming is a farm publication out of Lancaster, Penn. While she
says it primarily focuses on the dairy industry, it is the dominant
agricultural publication in the northeastern U.S.
In one issue
of Lancaster Farming, Zanoni says, there were a couple of
paragraphs buried inside the paper saying the draft had been
released.
"It piqued my
curiosity," Zanoni says. "I had heard things previously about the
USAIP (U.S. Animal Identification Plan) and so forth, but had never
read any of them or had any intention to, but I figured, ‘Oh, it's
getting serious.’"
"When I read
it," she says, "I was amazed. It was overblown and absurd. Insane.
Bureaucratic. It was just astounding to me that a relatively small
number of people could decide upon doing something like that that
would affect such a large number of people without any input from
the large number of people."
Zanoni, who
has a Ph.D. from Cornell and her law degree from Yale, is executive
director of Farm Life, a sustainable agriculture organization in
upstate New York. She taught at the University of Texas and clerked
for a New Jersey Supreme Court justice.
"I worked
with the federal court system," Zanoni says. "I was the head of the
staff attorney's office for the federal district courts in New
Jersey."
She's also
interned at grass-based dairies.
After reading
the 2005 draft strategic plan, she began speaking out on the
National Animal Identification System.
She's been
writing opinion pieces for various publications and speaking to
small breed associations and farm groups.
"I spoke at
the Northeast Organic Farming Association meeting this summer,"
Zanoni says. "That was in August. I was on a panel there with a
woman from Food and Water Watch from Washington, D.C., and man from
the Center for Science in the Public Interest in D.C. and the
Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture, Doug Gillespie."
Animal owners
in Massachusetts were angry with Gillespie because the state
department of agriculture took state data they had collected for
decades and gave it to the USDA.
"They've
historically had an animal census in Massachusetts," Zanoni
explains.
Last year,
the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture took all those records
and sent them to the USDA premises registration database, but
neither the farmers nor the legislators knew about it.
Soon
Massachusetts farmers were getting notification of their premise ID
numbers. A lot of farmers were confused and many of them were angry.
They had not signed up for the program.
At the
Northeast Organic Farming Association meeting, Zanoni says Gillespie
told farmers that technically, because the USDA registration is
voluntary, once they've received their registration number, they
could go online and get back out of the federal database.
With a laugh,
Zanoni says she's now getting reports from farmers who have tried to
remove their farms from the database and the government wants them
to sign a waiver of their legal rights to be removed from the
premise database.
"People don't
want to sign that because they say, ‘What if they don't take it out
of the database?’" Zanoni says. "They don't know what to do."
Zanoni says
the Northeast Organic Farming Association is actively opposing the
National Animal Identification System.
She was on a
program in Pennsylvania with several National Animal Identification
System officials.
That
vociferousness apparently resulted in an invitation to speak at the
ID Expo in Kansas City, Mo., in late August.
"I was
invited by Jim Clement, who organized that session," Zanoni says.
"He's the assistant state veterinarian in North Dakota, and he
organized that session, so he called me and invited me."
Dr. Clement
is also the animal ID coordinator for North Dakota, and Zanoni says
she assumes that he wanted different viewpoints at the conference.
"I don't
think the NIAA (National Institute for Animal Agriculture) has the
least interest in a point of view from outside," Zanoni says.
She thinks
they hope to implement the National Animal Identification System
eventually, and that the people who don't like it will just go away.
But she says
there is growing opposition to NAIS among small livestock producers
in the Northeast.
"What's even
more surprising to me is that the state regulators who are doing
this at the behest of the USDA, they find it surprising that people
would consider it objectionable to get this number in the mail of a
program that they don't want anything to do with, and it's supposed
to be voluntary," Zanoni says.
She says the
New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets has also taken
data from existing state programs and shared it with USDA.
"The
coordinators who work for this state are people whose positions were
created with grant money from USDA," Zanoni says.
Their jobs
wouldn't exist without the USDA, Zanoni contends.
"These are
new positions created because they got grant money from the USDA, so
they hired somebody to do NAIS work," she says.
Zanoni says
she had one report from a farmer that a woman he contacted with the
New York agriculture department told him the state was just taking
data from whatever state programs they had and sending it to the
USDA and the USDA was assigning premise ID numbers based on that
state information.
"Right now,
if you look at the NAIS website, they've got 322,000-plus premise
registrations," Zanoni says. "There is merit to our contention that
there's a difference between volunteering for a program and being
forced or being placed in it without even consultation and assenting
to it."
She questions
how many of those 322,000 are bogus.
"How many of
those people can actually show you where Joe Hog Farmer came and
filled out a form and said, 'I want to be in the program. I want a
premise registration?'" Zanoni asks. "You would think they would be
able to show that for every single one of them."
She thinks
all the premise IDs USDA has assigned in Massachusetts, New York and
now Pennsylvania might be invalid.
"Whatever has
been sent in from those three states is apparently completely bogus,
and none of those people actually volunteered," Zanoni says. "They
just took it from some existing database."
She says some
of the property owners might have volunteered, and some of them may
still volunteer to join the program, but some of them won't.
"In Vermont,
this whole thing has gone through three phases," Zanoni says.
"First, the USDA put out the draft strategic plan and said, ‘Here's
our intention. We're going to do rulemaking in the summer of 2006 to
make this a mandatory program, and here is how we expect it to go.’"
But that
rulemaking never happened.
"I guess
because they had complaints about it," Zanoni says, "for some reason
they didn't want to do that rulemaking last summer."
At least,
they didn't do any rulemaking.
"Instead,
they put out an implementation plan in April that said they're just
going to leave it voluntary for now," Zanoni says, "but if we don't
get 100 percent participation, we'll make it mandatory anytime we
feel like it. They didn't, couldn't or chose not to make it
mandatory that way."
Last year,
Zanoni says in some states, the agriculture departments went to
their state legislators and said they wanted legislation for
mandatory premise identification.
"They did
that in Vermont," Zanoni says. "They did that in Maine."
But a lot of
animal owners and farmers showed up at hearings and didn't want it.
The
legislators didn't want to impose an unpopular program.
In both Maine
and Vermont, Zanoni says, legislators told the state agriculture
departments they wouldn't pass it that year and to come back and try
the next year.
"As I
understand it, in Vermont," Zanoni says, "where they don't have any
mandatory premises ID, the number of people who volunteered was a
few hundred."
In New York
State, some 13,000 have been registered.
"In
Pennsylvania, they say they've submitted over 25,000," Zanoni says,
"but as far as I know, none of those are legitimate volunteers."
Zanoni
indicates that she thinks it's more than just an animal health
issue.
"You look at
this and you see complete top-down imposition of a way of doing
something," Zanoni says. "It's all interrelated with the dictates of
international trade and the dictates of international animal health.
It's a handmaiden for trade."
Right now,
she says, the U.S. loves the concept of foot and mouth disease-free
versus non-FMD-free areas because the U.S. has no FMD. It's an
advantage for the U.S.
"We can use
it to bludgeon other countries that aren't FMD-free," Zanoni says.
"If we had some FMD in this country, I betcha in a New York minute
our agriculture department would be going to the OIE, saying ‘That's
a false distinction. Let's do away with it.’"
In fact, she
questions whether the National Animal Identification System has
anything to do with animal health.
"All of these
things, when you start taking them apart and looking at them, they
seem to have nothing to do with any really legitimate concerns about
health," Zanoni says.
She says
animal ID became a priority when bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
BSE or mad cow disease, first hit the headlines. She says the
reaction to BSE was out of control.
There have
been fewer than 200 cases of variant CJD in human beings worldwide.
"It's a
really tragic disease," Zanoni ackowledges, "but it's a minute
number of people."
There have
fewer than 200 deaths of H5N1 avian influenza in the world since
they first recognized the strain a decade ago, she says.
"How's this
stuff becoming this giant pseudo problem that's somehow dominating
our thinking," she asks, "and allowing the imposition of these huge
bureaucratic control programs? I simply don't think any government
should have such complete knowledge or control over who owns
livestock, what are they doing with the livestock, where are they
selling the livestock, or where are they putting the livestock."
The USDA
keeps assuring everyone that the information will be kept
confidential, she says. They say they won't even go into any of the
databases unless a disease of concern pops up somewhere.
"The
temptation to use these databases for all kinds of other things is
going to irresistible," Zanoni counters. "The only way to keep a
database from being abused is to not have it."
Zanoni says
she doesn't find it comforting that the USDA wants to put the
animal-tracking database into private hands.
She also
questions the economics of it.
"There's
absolutely no cost control," Zanoni says.
She says
other federal programs like crop insurance are out of control.
"That's one
of those public-private partnerships," Zanoni says of the crop
insurance program. "Farmers don't complain about it because their
premiums are kept artificially low because they're subsidized, but
in the NAIS program, there's not going to be any government subsidy.
They keep saying that. They keep saying there will be costs to
producers. They won't really define or tell us how much it's going
to cost, but there will be costs to producers."
There has
been some indication, she says, that the animal ID program won't be
cheap.
"We know from
the rules that were introduced, although not implemented yet in
Texas, that it was going to be at least $10 a year for premise ID,
which is probably a realistically low cost," Zanoni says. "We know
that the RFID tags that you can get for $3.25 apiece only have a 70
percent read rate, so they're no good. You really have to buy ultra
high-frequency tags, which cost $20 a pop. There are an awful lot of
things walking around on four legs that don't yield you $20 after
you've sold them."
She says
she's seen one estimate that the reports filed each time an animal
is moved will cost 30 cents.
Zanoni says
she expects that to go up. Such cost coupled with the beef checkoff,
whether it's a dollar a head or goes up to two dollars a head, will
just add to the overhead for small producers.
"It's the
exact same thing as the crop insurance scam," Zanoni says. "It's
just a way for a few players to make a lot of money off
government-sponsored programs. It's even more offensive because the
crop insurance isn't mandatory and the farmers at least get the
subsidized premiums. In animal ID, you're going to get no subsidy
from the government and it's going to be mandatory eventually. Even
if you didn't want it, you wouldn't be able to send animals to the
auction without it."
The luckiest
thing that ever happened to the opponents of animal ID, Zanoni says,
is that USDA released the draft strategic plan.
"What a giant
mistake that was," Zanoni says. "If they had just gone ahead with
all this underhanded subterfuge like assigning the numbers in
Pennsylvania and New York, then we wouldn't have known what the heck
they were. That incompetence might seem funny, but if they impose
the plan and it's mandatory, we're going to put up not only with
that degree of incompetence but worse in the running of the plan." |
