We are almost done with the snow - February was a long, snowy month for everybody here (7th straight day of at least flurries today). The animals are getting stir-crazy and if I never slog through slush again... let's just say that March is Mud Season and I would like to move onto Mud at this point. Mud takes your boot, but at least you can lift your boot out of it easier. :D
Anyway, the song that Carol is learning on the piano... the kids keep singing around the house (even Eiley) is the Beatles' "Across the Universe", but we like the Fiona Apple cover of the song. She makes the words easier to hear.
Enjoy this lilting jaunt through a gray day in northern England.
NAIS was a federal program that proposed to keep track of all animals that moved (farm to farm, farm to market, farm to slaughterhouse). It began with a good premise: keeping track of all animals so that disease could be back-tracked before it spread too far. The mad cow (BSE) scare of 2003 was the starting point for this program.
However, the food scare problem never came from the smallest producers - it was the factory farms. The program was worded without input and done so poorly that it forced all producers, even hobby breeders to register and track all animal movements. My 13 roosters going to slaughter. Individual goat purchases. The horse we bought. And those tracking devices were my cost - tattoos wouldn't be enough, we needed tags with digital transmitters. $5-10 per goat. According to the USDA's own comments, about 92% of small producers opposed the NAIS.
Yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture announced that the current proposal was going to be scrapped (NYT article, NoNAIS post, and Business Week article). Some new framework with similar concerns but focused on interstate commerce and some measure of lower priced labelling would be worked out in the coming months. Transparently.
