News from NOFA/Massachusetts
Organic Farmers Say National Animal ID is a False Solution for Real Animal Disease Problems
"For Immediate Release: Thursday, April 20, 2006.
Contacts: Jack Kittredge 978-355-2853, Ben Grosscup 413-658-5374"
The USDA's plan to require that all livestock producers identify and report movements of all their animals to a central database is a misguided approach for confronting animal disease problems, says the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA/Mass) in a new statement.
On April 6, the USDA released its plan for implementing the controversial plan called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). This comes just one year after the Department released its "Draft Program Standards" for the NAIS, which suggested that by 2009, all livestock owners in the country would be responsible for tracking and reporting all movements of their animals. The new implementation plan stipulates specific "benchmarks for progress" by which the program can be assessed according to the level of voluntary participation in it. The benchmark for January 2009 is 100% participation.
Animal tracking is currently the USDA's leading plan for containing animal disease outbreaks such as bird flu and mad cow's disease (or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). The USDA says it wants to be able to trace back the movements of infected animals throughout their entire lives so they can identify the premises that are likely to be infected.
But organic farming advocates are joining a growing opposition to the NAIS, raising questions about the overall approach the USDA is taking. NOFA/Mass points out that the test for BSE is simple, reliable, and cheap and could effectively protect consumers from the disease. "The modest usefulness of a tracking system to identify possible herd mates who might have been . . . exposed to tainted feed years ago pales in comparison to the far simpler alternative of testing every cow for BSE upon slaughter, before the meat reaches the market, as is done in Europe and Japan," states the organic farming group. This approach has been specifically rejected by the USDA, which has prohibited private companies from independently testing cows at the slaughterhouse.
The move to identify poultry would also be a step in the wrong direction, says NOFA/Mass. The USDA and certain FAO officials have issued numerous statements suggesting wild birds and pastured chicken flocks are the primary suspect for spreading bird flu. Organic farmers are concerned that that this analysis is poorly reflective of the available facts, and may be biased toward the interests of the meat industry. "The evidence that wild birds play a primary role in the transmission of avian flu is scant at best, and far better evidence suggests that the spread is connected to shipments of live birds and poultry manure from factory farms via rail and truck routes," reports the organic farming group. This evidence, they say, implicates the overcrowded production practices of today's factory farms.
In low-density, dispersed populations, such as flocks of wild birds or backyard chickens, the viruses that tend to survive are the ones that remain low-pathogenic. If a virus mutates into a highly pathogenic form in these circumstances, it quickly kills all available hosts and then dies out. The highly concentrated environment of factory farms, however, provides perfect conditions for a virus to mutate from a low pathogenic to a high pathogenic form. Thousands of hosts (chickens) with near identical genetic makeup, all the same age and size, crowded in close conditions, allow a virus to kill its host and move onto the next victim with great speed and ease.
Organic farmers believe that the presence of soil rich with microbial activity, and access to sunlight, fresh air and water are vital to raising healthy animals. The National Organic Standards call for all animals to be raised with access to the out-of-doors. Organic farmers are concerned that animal tracking could lead to greater pressure on farmers to confine their animals, making organic livestock production effectively impossible. They also worry that animal tracking, which would record premises where animals are still raised on pasture, could make their flocks into "misplaced targets" of mass culling.
Jack Kittredge, NOFA/Mass Social Action Coordinator and owner of Many Hands Organic Farm in Barre, MA said, "The expenses of this program for tags, software, 24/7 monitoring and reporting will be carried by the animal owners. For many small farmers, it is likely to be prohibitive. Large factory farms support NAIS in part because they know it will put many small, organic pastured operations out of business.
Local organic farmers are raising the healthiest animals in the agricultural economy today," said Ben Grosscup, NOFA/Mass NAIS Coordinator. "It's a tragedy that the USDA is trying to enact an animal tracking system that would put the heaviest burden on the small and sustainable farmers whose ecological production practices hold the greatest hope for the future of agriculture."
Patti Stanko, an organic consumer and farmer from Winchendon, MA said, "A radio frequency tag won't stop a chicken from getting sick if it is raised on top of other chickens in a factory farm." Stanko does not accept the USDA's reasoning that NAIS will address disease problems. "Tracking won't stop the diseases if animals are kept in crowded conditions where they are being raised in their own feces. If they want to curtail animal disease, they should go after the root of the problem -- the conditions of factory farms -- not the symptoms," she said.
This Earth Day, NOFA members all over Massachusetts will be delivering their message on NAIS, arguing that the solution to animal disease is not animal ID but curbing our dependence on factory farms and turning toward local and sustainable alternatives. NOFA/Mass's statement and many other resources can be found at www.nofam0.org.
This page was last modified on January 21, 2008 at 5:34:27 PM.
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