News from NOFA/Massachusetts

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Why Many Massachusetts Organic Farmers and Consumers Oppose Mandatory Animal Tracking

What is Animal Tracking?

Animal tracking is an information management system that would enable a central authority to monitor the whereabouts of virtually all the animals in the country. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has proposed implementing such a system in the US by 2008 or 2009. Although initially proposed for livestock, the USDA has specifically refused to rule out eventually including pets and companion animals such as dogs and cats. Called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), it has three components.

1) Premises registration would require all farms, factories, slaughterhouses, or homes where even a single livestock animal (cow, horse, pig, chicken, sheep, goat or several dozen other species) lives or is processed to be identified by name of owner, address, phone number, Global Positioning Satellite coordinates and a 7-digit premises ID number in a central registry.

2) Each animal would be assigned a unique 15 digit federal ID number and a tag most likely an implanted radio-frequency identification device (RFID) which can be read at a distance. In cases where livestock are kept and moved as a group throughout their entire life cycle, producers would be allowed to assign an ID number to the group rather than to each individual animal. The idea of using DNA or retinal scans as sources of unique identification has also been discussed.

3) Data on each animals birth, movements on or off any premises, tagging events (application, loss, replacement) and slaughter would be compiled and regularly updated in a database which could tell where and when each animal was born, who bought it, where they took it, when it saw a vet, and where it went for slaughter.

Third parties, such as veterinarians, would be required to report sightings of animals without RFID tags or otherwise in violation of the NAIS.

What Problems is Tracking Supposed to Solve?

In recent years a number of animal diseases have become human health concerns. Such diseases include avian influenza, mad cow (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE) and food borne illnesses. The USDA and some industry organizations are saying that they need animal tracking to contain animal diseases.

Avian Influenza (AI) has been endemic for centuries but only rarely poses any serious health consequences for birds, and less still for humans. Only since 1997 has the H5N1 subtype of the virus mutated into a form that can, with difficulty, infect humans. The worst outbreaks of this subtype occurred in Southeast Asia in 2003. So far it has killed 111 people mostly agricultural workers and people who live near infected poultry. By some estimates it has killed or prompted the culling of over 200 million chickens. According to the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the spread of AI may have been facilitated by the rapid scale-up and concentration of poultry and pig operations in China and Southeast Asia. Currently AI is not very infectious to humans (one has to be exposed to infected poultry for long periods) but, like any virus, it can mutate to a more infectious form given the proper conditions.

Mad Cow (BSE) appears to have emerged in the 1980s in the feed processing plants of England. As a way of getting cheap protein for rapid weight gain, some feedlots added to their cattle feed small bits and pieces of animal tissue which were discarded during processing. Scientists suspect that BSE emerged when sheep infected with scrapie, a disease similar to mad cow, were fed to cattle that were in turn rendered and fed back to other cattle. Scrapie in sheep, BSE in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in elk and deer are all caused by prions, rogue proteins that make their way into the brain and poke it with holes, destroying normal cells and causing animals to stumble, show aggression, and eventually die. The prions stay active after slaughter and can spread to humans who eat affected meat. BSE has been found in cattle in at least 30 countries. Officials estimate that the related disease transmitted to humans has killed at least 150 people in Great Britain.

Food Borne Illness, such as Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7, is spread by contaminated meat or animal products. Salmonella may result in deaths from acute Salmonellosis in around 600 people a year, whereas E. coli O157:H7 is implicated in about 60 deaths per year in the U.S. One can avoid harm from these diseases by reasonable home sanitation and thoroughly cooking food.

Where Do These Emerging Diseases Come From?

Humans and animals have evolved (and continue to evolve) along with bacteria, viruses, and other disease-causing agents. Animals have developed complicated immune systems that identify, isolate, and attack disease agents. If new forms of a disease develop for which our immune systems are not prepared, there is a period during which we are susceptible to serious illness and even death. But eventually immune systems learn how to identify and counter the new agent, neutralizing it as serious threat. The primary public health challenge, therefore, is to minimize the chances of new diseases evolving.

Fortunately, we know a lot about what conditions encourage rapid transmission and evolution of disease agents environments that are warm and moist, crowded with many genetically similar hosts, and devoid of sunlight and fresh air. Unfortunately, massive meat conglomerates have been creating these very conditions at breakneck speed all around the globe. In the last 50 years, in the name of cheaper food, these factory farms have industrialized and concentrated the worlds livestock, taking them from millions of backyards and small farms and enclosing them in giant facilities operated for maximum production. Oklahomas Texas County, for instance, in 1990 had 11,000 hogs. Today it has more than a million. Five percent of our farms now raise the majority of our beef. Corporations produce 98% of all U.S. poultry. Some Chinese factory farms raise 5 million chickens at a time.

The blowback from these historically unprecedented developments in animal husbandry is now becoming clear. 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. Following up on reports of a die-off of wild birds due to H5N1 at Erkhel Lake in Mongolia, veterinarians found that only one sample turned out positive for the virus. Researcher Dr. William Karesh commented that the virus had a very low impact The disease is self-limiting in wild birds. 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.

A consensus is emerging among scientists, ecologists and human health experts that H5N1 avian flu, as well as diseases such as monkey pox, HIV/Aids, West Nile virus, Ebola, Sars, BSE and Lyme disease may be emerging in animals and crossing more easily to humans because of environmental changes taking place and a global trade in confined livestock animals and their products. We have created ideal conditions for breeding new diseases and placed the host animals under conditions of such overcrowding and stress that their own immune systems cant adequately protect them. As Gerhard Wagner, an officer of the FAO based in Thailand, puts it: Intensive industrial farming of livestock is now an opportunity for emerging diseases. Canadian virologist Earl Brown, a specialist in the evolution of influenza viruses, agrees: You have to say that high intensity chicken rearing is a perfect environment for generating virulent avian flu virus.

Are Factory Animal Farms Here to Stay?

This dangerous state of affairs is not only creating major health and environmental problems, it is also threatening its own continued existence. The factory farms that industry has thrown up around the globe are now facing their own lack of sustainability.

Manure Disposal - Factory farms could not exist without chemical fertilizer, which has allowed for a previously unimaginable uncoupling of livestock and crops. Millions of animals in one place can produce tens of millions of pounds of manure a day. Moving that manure promptly to where it might usefully fertilize fields is difficult and prohibitively expensive. Instead, it is contained for months in lagoons and some is volatilized into the air. A 1995 hog manure spill in North Carolina killed 10 million fish and closed 364,000 acres of coastal shellfish beds. Children in the San Joachim Valleys factory dairy belt have asthma rates three times the national average. The American Public Health Association has urged a moratorium on all new concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) until a comprehensive health assessment can be conducted of them. North Carolina State University professor C. M. Williams, an expert on treating hog manure, says simply: I do not feel that system [factory hog production] is long-term sustainable.

Water Consumption - To produce a pound of beef under factory conditions can require an astonishing 1350 gallons of water. In many cases this water comes from underground reservoirs (like the Midwests Ogallala aquifer) which are rapidly dropping to levels that make pumping costs exorbitant. Former National Academy of Sciences director Dr. Charles Benbrook says that further expansion of factory dairy farms "doesn't make sense and is patently unsustainable because water will become too costly..."

Antibiotic Use - Factory animal operations routinely administer low levels of antibiotics in the animals feed to promote growth. Over two-thirds of the antibiotics used in the US each year are for non-therapeutic use in animal feed. This is unsustainable because such overuse is rapidly leading to antibiotic resistance in livestock. Worse, many in the medical profession have become alarmed over the explosion of antibiotic resistance in humans that results from this practice. When we eat such meat the resistant bacteria are transferred to our own digestive tracts and pass that resistance along, making many antibiotics useless in fighting human infections.

Genetic Uniformity - As animals are bred for maximum weight gain under factory conditions, competitive economic pressures force the abandonment of traditional, slower growing breeds. But genetic diversity has long been a component of true food security. When conditions change, old breeds may have the needed traits to survive that have been bred out of newer varieties. There are reports, for instance, of native Asian chickens surviving the H5N1 virus that has been so fatal to Western breeds. Over the last 100 years some 1000 breeds of livestock have gone extinct. The problem is greatest in industrial countries, but is accelerating in developing countries as they adopt western production systems.

Energy Use Animal confinement systems rely upon fossil fuel energy to provide feed, water, ventilation, manure removal, animal movement, and other essential services. A pastured setting, however, provides these to animals through its own ecological networks rather than by energy inputs from afar. Considering the energy used to produce and run machinery, to produce inorganic fertilizer, to dry crops, and to ventilate and heat buildings, a ton of pasture fodder requires less than 2% of the fossil fuel energy used to produce a ton of feed concentrate. As fossil fuel energy becomes more and more expensive, confinement systems will find it harder to stay competitive.

Anita Poole, of Oklahomas Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, puts it this way: The factory system of food production will simply implode.

Why Wont Tracking Work to Solve Disease Threats?

Tracking is a false solution to a real problem. Like food irradiation or routine use of antibiotics in animal feed, it is an attempt to paper-over the need for a fundamental change in the way factory farms raise and process livestock animals. So long as we try to address the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem, we will prolong its life.

In the case of avian flu, factory farmed poultry live in flocks that are maintained together for the life of the birds. If an outbreak of avian flu occurs, the whole flock is killed and burned and the poultry house sterilized. Nearby flocks are also typically culled. The locations of these flocks are well known and it is not clear what new information a tracking system would add.

In the case of mad cow, the disease is not discovered until the animal is slaughtered and tissue samples sent to a lab. The modest usefulness of a tracking system to identify possible herd mates who might have been similarly 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. The test is easy, reliable, and cheap. Why our government has not adopted such routine testing of beef mystifies our foreign customers.

In the case of food-borne illnesses, meat contamination usually occurs during high speed processing at a slaughterhouse. This is after the animal is dead and tracking has ceased. Current food safety measures identifying meat by lot number as it moves to market, and normal care in sanitation and food preparation, are more useful than identifying where the affected animal came from.

NAIS Would Hurt Small Farmers

The most immediate impact of mandating NAIS would be to put some small farmers out of business.

Cost: No one knows how much such a tracking system will cost, but the purchase of tags, reporting software, and the time involved in setting up and maintaining a 24/7 reporting system for small farmers with only a few animals would likely be significant. Moreover, models proposed to date indicate that farmers eventually will be charged fees for registrations and for reporting events to databases. For many it will simply be the last straw.

Pressure to confine animals: The FAO and various foreign governments have reacted prematurely and somewhat hysterically to outbreaks of avian flu by concluding that migratory birds are spreading the virus. Unfortunately, some governments have gone so far as to outlaw backyard poultry. Animal tracking would identify and record premises where animals are still raised on pasture, and would give nervous public health officials an obvious, although misplaced, target. 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. In Southeast Asia the country least affected by bird flu is Laos, where 90% of poultry is still produced by peasants in small, pastured flocks. Nevertheless, numerous countries have outlawed the outdoor raising of poultry, making it impossible for many small farmers in developing countries to have backyard birds for meat, eggs, and fertilizer. Backyard poultry provide both food security and farming income for hundreds of millions of rural poor in developing countries, as well as a third of the protein intake for the average rural household.

Religious Objections: Many religious groups in this country believe in raising animals for their own food as well as for manure, farm traction and transportation. Yet their beliefs forbid them to register or comply with an electronic, technology-dependent monitoring system.

Bureaucracy and Privacy Objections: Many people keep animals as a lifestyle choice rather than a business. For some of these, registering and monitoring requirements seem intrusive and out of keeping with the traditional life style they are seeking.

NAIS Would Hurt Consumers

Animal tracking would hurt consumers by limiting alternatives and further monopolizing the food economy.

Loss of Alternatives: Many consumers now seek out local, small scale, and organic food because they believe it is raised in a more healthy fashion. To the extent that suppliers of this food are driven from business by the costs of mandatory animal tracking or the accompanying pressure to abandon pastured flocks, consumers will have only the mass-produced factory-farmed food left to buy. Samuel Jutzi, director of Animal Production and Health for the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts it this way: This [more natural] type of production will become very marginal. High quality poultry, raised in the open air and grain-fed, will become a niche product.

Further Concentration of Food Industry: Big poultry companies are actively using fear about avian flu to further their efforts to restructure the poultry industry and do away with small-scale producers. Margaret Say, Southeast Asian director of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council openly admits it is her goal to close down as many backyard farms as possible. With fewer producers, those companies remaining are closer to monopoly control which is always a bad thing for consumers.

NAIS Would Hurt Organic Farmers

Organic farmers believe that the presence of soil, with its millions of competing microbes, plus sunlight, fresh air and water are vital to raising healthy animals. National Organic Standards call for all animals to be raised with access to the out-of-doors. If animal tracking were to be implemented and farmers pressured into confining their animals, it would make organic livestock production impossible.

What Can I Do to Help?

As a livestock owner, you should not participate in any so-called voluntary state or federal program to register farms or animals. The USDA is using farmers supposed willingness to enter such voluntary programs as a justification for making the program mandatory. If a state or extension official urges registration of your premises or livestock you should request to see the persons ID, ask whether registration is mandatory, about any deadline, and ask for a copy of the legislation or other rule authorizing such a requirement. Let NOFA/Mass know about the visit so we can alert others.

Also, contact your breed association, organic or sustainable or other farming interest group and ask them to oppose NAIS. Also ask them to write to officials commenting on the program. Many livestock industry groups have been supporting the program, but that could diminish as opposition builds and the programs many flaws become more apparent.

Finally, if the time comes when the program is going into effect and you feel your rights are being violated, you can contact groups which may provide legal representation without cost. Some sources of information to try are: (1) Farmers Legal Action Group, www.flaginc.org, 651-223-5400; (2) the American Civil Liberties Union, www.aclu.org; for the ACLU in your state, see the pull-down menu on the bottom of that page, under your local ACLU; (3) Organizations defending religious freedom, such as The Becket Fund, www.becketfund.org, 202-955-0095, and The Rutherford Institute, www.rutherford.org, 434-978-3888; and (4) www.abanet.org/legalservices/findlegalhelp/home.cfm, the American Bar Associations guide to legal services.

As an individual, you can educate your neighbors by asking NOFA/Mass for a speaker on NAIS to your group or by writing a letter to your local paper and contacting state and federal legislators to express your opinion on this program. You can find contact information for officials through www.vote-smart.org or through the federal governments site www.firstgov.gov. Personal letters, Emails and phone calls all work. Stay tuned to our website www.nofamass.org for updates on how the program is developing and other ways to get involved.

As a consumer you can patronize farmers who raise meat, milk and eggs in a way you support. Talk to the farmer, ask questions, tell him or her what you like and dont like about those practices. The strength of local farming is that such feedback is possible and can be acted upon immediately. For those seeking organic sources, NOFA/Mass publishes an Organic Food Guide and lists organic producers on our website at www.nofamass.org.

Donate to help us print more literature, and distribute literature to your farm or garden store or library.

Join NOFA/Mass to learn more about organic growing in the Northeast and to help the cause! Membership information is below:

Annual Dues: Individual $30, Family $40. Supporting $100, Low-Income $20
Contact: Membership, 411 Sheldon Road, Barre, MA 01005, (978) 355-2853, or email: info@nofam0.org
NOFA/Mass NAIS Response Coordinator, Ben Grosscup, 413-658-5374, or email: ben.grosscup@nofam0.org

This page was last modified on January 21, 2008 at 5:33:45 PM.