The National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a proposed system for tagging all livestock in the US with chips for the sake of food safety tracking, is dying of oxygen deprivation according to the excellent Jill Richardson over at La Vida Locavore.
Chipping, in and of itself, isn’t the issue. Personally, I think all factory farms with, say, over 5000 “units” should be chipping their animals and tracking them in case of an outbreak. It’s the mandatory cost and paperwork burden on small farmers, especially the ones who sell direct to consumers and can track 100% guaranteed, that makes NAIS absurd. The expense alone makes NAIS very much like a “pay to play” agricultural marketing check-off, which itself is like a medieval guild stamp — a means to serve the big players’ needs and force small players out of the “guild.” In this case it’s even more insidious, because the “check off’,” that is, the chip, is used to create a food safety measure, ostensibly. Pay to chip your animals, small farmer, or you’ll be branded as irresponsible and unclean, and put out of business. It’s very hard for me not to see NAIS as a way to clean up the field of “niche” markets (local, grass-fed, organic, etc).
This is not lost on the small livestock producer. According to the stoutly defiant No NAIS, Beef Magazine made the mistake of running a poll on NAIS, only to get 75% of respondents saying the proposed system should be scrapped. Beef Magazine’s blog complains that, darn it, usually Beef Mag readers are 50/50 on this issue (not sure I’d call attention to that). But a small, motivated anti-NAIS contingent is stirring up trouble and driving traffic to the online poll! *pout*
Sucks when the little people get uppity, eh, Big Beef?
