NAIS bites the dust (finally)

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.

Now that is my kind of birthday present.