USCA on DTN Ag Policy Blog
Want Hay, Where's Your ID?
A couple of interesting tidbits on animal identification have cropped up in the past few days, one reflecting the potential opportunity that animal identification could present for cattlemen and the other reflecting potential risk.
Peter Shinn of the Brownfield Network reported Tuesday that the Iowa Cattlemen's Association voted to "study implementing a mandatory ID system along the lines of one Michigan recently put in place." The producer who put forward the resolution said he wanted to see whether such a system would better help get exports on track. Michigan, as of now, is the only state where producers must have radio-frequency ID tags on all of their livestock.
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/.
If Michigan producers or packers have seen improved market access because of animal identification, I suspect producers in more states will investigate this issue. Can anyone tell me if Michigan producers are getting a premium for their RFID-tagged cattle?
Another item came from North Carolina, a state I visited in August that suffered a pretty severe drought this past year. In December, North Carolina's governor got approval to spend $3.5 million to get hay to livestock producers. Under the program, the state is buying hay from other states, shipping it to North Carolina and then selling the hay to cattle producers and horse owners as cheaply as possible. Sounds like a logical plan for livestock producers in desperate need of feedstuffs. The catch is that livestock producers must have a premise identification registered with the state to get this aid.
Looking at USDA figures, North Carolina is about parallel to the country in percentage of estimated farm or premise registrations with 29 percent of the state's livestock producers registered compared with 30 percent nationally. North Carolina, though, also is among the top two pork-producing states and pork producers have been far better about registering their farms or confinement operations than cattle producers.
http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/.
Whether it is considered backhanded or simply process, the North Carolina situation is probably indicative of what's going to happen more across the country as these states and livestock groups push to appease USDA and keep that National Animal Identification System money flowing to their coffers. When a crisis hits, opportunistic bureaucrats are going to start the drumrolls to boost their registration figures any way they can.
Opponents of mandatory animal ID and premise registration have put up a valiant effort to defend their rights to privacy, but you can just see the writing on the wall that somehow, someway government will find a way to win out on this one and everyone will be registered in a database somewhere. These efforts are going to become more intense in the next year as USDA works to reach a "critical mass" of premise registration for the cattle industry by 2009.
In another cattle note, the U.S. Cattlemen's Association raised questions earlier this week about the status of USDA's proposal last year to import beef from Argentina, a country that continues to struggle with foot and mouth disease in its cattle. USDA remains tight-lipped about the status of its proposal, which was initially put out there for public comment a year ago.
The effort wouldn't allow live-cattle imports from Argentina, just beef. Foot and mouth disease doesn't affect humans, but is rapidly contagious in livestock. The U.S. right now remains free of the disease, which would wreak havoc if it ever hit the national herd. While it's extraordinarily remote that importing beef from Argentina would translate into the disease getting into the U.S. cattle herd, if the federal government is willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to compile data on livestock in case there is ever a national disease outbreak, doesn't also make sense to continue simple preventive barriers to ensure the outbreak doesn't occur in the first place? I'm a pretty big beef eater and frankly I haven't found there to be such a dearth of beef in supermarkets, fast food or other restaurants that we would need to import beef from countries trying to grapple with disease issues we do not have ourselves.
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