Local farmers association protests national animal ID program

The Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (VICFA), a statewide organization with leaders locally, has formed a national grassroots organization to lobby against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the group announced last week.
    NAIS seeks to keep track of all livestock through microchip technology. Federal officials say the system will allow them to chase down disease outbreaks. Under the program, all cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry and other livestock—even chickens that are only used for a family’s home-use eggs—would be tracked. The USDA seeks to make NAIS mandatory for all farms by 2008.
    Small farmers criticize the program, saying they’ve been keeping good track of livestock for generations, and NAIS’s costs will crush their small businesses.
    Debbie Stockton, editor of VICFA Voice, the organization’s newsletter, says the program “puts independent farmers in terrible peril. This program as it is currently written would wipe out independent and small farmers in this country, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”
    NAIS has been volunteer-enrolling farms at the state level with 282,394 farms enrolled nationally so far. The farms are given a seven-digit ID number and animals are tagged with a Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID), which can cost up to $3 per animal. Farmers must keep records of animals’ births, deaths and locations if they leave the premises.
    Stockton calls the level of intervention “absurd.” Under the program, “if you take your horse for a trail ride and leave your property you have to report to the government,” she says.
    VICFA’s national lobby, the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (NICFA), has legal counsel and is planning trips to Washington, D.C., as NAIS moves toward the national levels.
    Stockton is hopeful the economics and politics of the issue will break it in Congress. “We’re very hopeful,” she says. “The groundswell in opposition to this is enormous all over the country.”
    Local farm advocates view NAIS as another blow to local, independent food systems. Stockton says, “The most secure farm system in the world is a local, decentralized food system.… They say we have to do this in the industrial world because it has to become a standard, and we say ‘no.’”