Victory! The Farmers Have Spoken

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack will announce today the scrapping of plans for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) program—a plan proposed under the Bush '43 administration to tag all livestock and track them in a database as a means of isolating infected animals in case of a disease outbreak. The program has met with significant resistance from livestock farmers. I reported in a previous post how Wendell Berry testified before a Congressional hearing that he would go to jail before allowing his animals to be tagged. The Department of Agriculture is going back to the drawing board to design a new, less intrusive plan.

The whole concept of NAIS was rife with problems: a huge expense for farmers, the commodification of livestock, and misplaced priorities. If USDA wants to do something about the spread of animal-based disease it ought to focus on preventing the occurrence of the disease before containing its spread. And most animal-based diseases arise because of commercial livestock practices: Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the feeding of infected animal parts back to well animals, and the over-medication of commercial livestock making them resistant to new strains of disease. The best way to prevent disease in livestock is to pasture them and feed them on a wide variety of grasses and herbs, an environment naturally suited to suppressing the spread of disease.

Thankfully Secretary Vilsack listened to the voices of the people his policies would impact most—though eliminating NAIS does little to change the policies that allow for diseases to arise and flourish in the currently legal livestock factory-farms.