DVD!
photo credit: sashafatcat
But is the USDA Really Listening??
USDA Listening Sessions on their attempts at a National Animal ID and Tracking System have been packed with vocal opponents to this Orwellian plan. In city after city, the NAIS has been roundly condemned by those farmers and ranchers and even consumers who will ultimately pay the price for an ill-conceived boondoggle. With America struggling for economic recovery, why does our government try to implement an expensive plan that will hurt our domestic economy and drive meat prices up? The following is the testimony given by an anti-NAIS leader in the farming community at a Texas listening session.
Statement by Judith McGeary, Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance at the May 20, 2009 USDA Listening Session in Austin, TX.
My name is Judith McGeary, and I am the Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. FARFA represents small farmers, homesteaders, and consumers across the country, and we are opposed to the USDA’s implementation of NAIS. We are submitting detailed written comments for the record, and will cover just a few highlights here.
USDA says we need to trace every single animal in the country. But traceability should not be a goal in and of itself, it is simply a tool to achieve other goals. Proponents of NAIS claim that it is the solution for animal health, food safety, and food security. But NAIS will actually accomplish none of these.
With respect to animal health, existing disease control programs, combined with normal farm and sales barn practices, provide sufficient traceability already. Traceability is not the weak link in the chain for animal disease control. In fact, while the 2005 GAO report on agro-terrorism identified a long list of things that USDA needed to change in order to effectively address the risk of widespread disease outbreaks, traceability was not identified as one of the problems
USDA’s claim that we need 48-hour traceback of all animal movements is not supported by scientific studies or logic. The agency should focus on high risk situations, namely the factory farms. The agency should also look at the specific diseases of concern and how they are spread. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work. Most importantly, we need to prevent disease, not chase it.
With respect to food safety, we don’t need “farm to fork traceability,” we need “factory to fork traceability.” The source of food-borne illnesses lies with the large, centralized slaughter and processing facilities. E coli and salmonella contamination occur at the slaughterhouse, and we need traceability from the slaughterhouse to the consumer. Tracing live animals, as NAIS does, will do nothing to improve food safety. Instead, NAIS will provide false reassurance to consumers, while the USDA continues to avoid making critical improvements that would actually improve food safety.
Ultimately, NAIS will reduce food security. We’re told to diversify our investments for financial security. We need to do the same thing with our food – diversify our food supply by encouraging millions of small, local farms and processors. NAIS tries to substitute high tech solutions for the inherent safety that comes from diversity, and it will fail.
While not providing any real benefits for farmers or consumers, NAIS will impose significant costs. The cost-benefit analysis released by USDA last month has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. The study violates accepted statistical practices by lumping more than ¾ of the producers into one category, disguising the real costs to small farms and people with just a few animals. The study did not even try to quantify the costs of individually identifying poultry or feeder sheep. Instead it assumed that all poultry and feeder sheep would be identified as groups, even though the USDA’s definition of group identification limits its applicability, in practice, to factory farms. The study makes numerous unsupported and indefensible assumptions about the costs of the technological infrastructure of NAIS as well as the realities of animal-related businesses.
The cost-benefit analysis reflects the true push behind NAIS: the economic concerns of Agribusiness and technology companies. The government should not impose a program on millions of people for the benefit of a handful of huge corporations.
This box contains approximately 2,000 pages of petition signatures, from all over the country. No one was paid to collect these signatures – they are from the volunteer efforts of regular people who will be impacted by NAIS. This is the grassroots saying No to NAIS.
Judith McGeary Represents Thousands of Farmers and Ranchers
Judith McGeary is a small farmer and attorney in Austin, Texas, and the Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. She has a B.S. in Biology from Stanford University and a J.D. with high honors from The University of Texas at Austin. Her legal practice has focused on environmental law, commercial litigation, and appeals. She and her husband run a small farm with horses, cattle, sheep, and poultry. To join FARFA or more information, go to www.farmandranchfreedom.org or call 1-866-687-6452.
6 Comments
Awesome post. I’m glad to hear people are still fighting big brother.I am opposed to all types of RFID and tracking systems, not just livestock. Every time I see that commercial with the kid locator I cringe. Remember, to the government, we are just another kind of livestock.
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I tend to be a pessimist, particularly in regard to government, and have a feeling that the USDA knows exactly what the ramifications of NAIS are and don’t really care. However, it’s great to see continued resistance against it. Thank you Judith and everyone else who’s been speaking against it!
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Thank you so much for this blog, I am getting so tired of people dissing this wonderful WHOLE food. Please people educate your selves on benefits of something, read about it, watch videos of people who say good things about it… Finally try it. You don’t have to, but how will you know why people are fighting so passionately for it?
This is to all those who bad mouth raw milk:
You can’t ban and bad mouth a food because of a few bad cases, what about “FDA Approved” foods like the peanut butter with ecoli and the hundreds of other breakouts of foods sold in grocery stores? You have the right not to drink it, but stop bad mouthing it and supporting the governments pursuit to make it extinct. What about if the government goes after something YOU love and feel have the right to purchase it? Would you like others to support it even if they never tried it and don’t have much knowledge about it? Just put your selves in our situation. Anyone should be able to get what they need and consider to be the best for THEIR family, no one has to approve of your choices, it’s YOUR family, YOUR money.
People who want to drink it and have the right to make their OWN choice will not be able to do so. I don’t want to drink milk from slaughter houses and mistreated loaded with hormones and antibiotics cows. I have a trusted farmer and I have been buying from them for over 27 years… My children were raised on raw milk, I was too, so were my parents and grandparents and all my ancestors and we are never going to buy the poisonous milk from the MASS Production industries. It’s MY Choice, and the choice of other Americans what they want to spend their hard earned money on, you can’t hear one side of the story and make an uneducated decision… did you ever try it? Or are YOU letting other people make that decision for you?
Have you ever even researched the benefits? If we drank raw milk we would be healthier and the pharmaceutical companies couldn’t make their trillions pushing their chemicals on us with dangerous side effects. The FDA approves drugs which have a clear warning MAY CAUSE DEATH!
The doctors are getting huge bonus checks from the pharmaceutical companies the more they prescribe it the more money they get, they do not have our health at heart, I know that they would loose out if we were healthier and didn’t need their toxic deadly chemicals, they will do anything to keep us from ingesting anything that is good for us, use anyone to do it, and use any tactic to accomplish their goals. Their goal is to scare people, to be too afraid to even try it… they never list any benefits of Raw milk, or say that it is an isolated case.It is their GOAL to make it extinct so we will continue getting sicker and weaker and so will our children and their children until they will have no more suckers to fool and deceive, and get rich on.
Please everyone. Support your local farmers, find a farm within a 100 miles of your location, and make a trip twice a month to buy all your dairy products only from them. It will help so much.
Many farmers also sell beef, and their cows are fed by letting them graze on grass… find your local farms and read about them on their websites… most have them. I shop only at my local farm, you also have to read about the benefits of raw milk: http://www.realmilk.com/healthbenefits.html (feel free to browse around they have many wonderful informative pages.
I was brought up on raw milk, I am sure most of you still remember the milk in glass bottles being delivered early in the morning by your local farmer. Raw milk can be dangerous if the farm is neglectful as with everything else in life, but if the cows are clean and healthy you will never get sick and only benefit a 1000 times over ingesting the processed pasteurized and altered dairy at our local stores. Help support your local farmers, you can’t even find REAL raw dairy products at any store, not even health food stores, because the government is sticking their noses into our kitchens now.
I will never buy another ounce of dairy from the market unless they start supporting the local farmers instead of the slaughter houses and mass produced dairy by tortured cows, raised and kept in cruel conditions. Just look at how many more diseases do we suffer from since we started drinking everything homogenized and pasteurized. More and more of us are ill with bone diseases and deficiencies, which in the process cause serious, even deadly consequences.
Please go to http://www.realmilk.com and learn more about how much you will benefit your family and the environment by making even one hefty shopping trip to your local Farm
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/holy-cow/
http://www.youtube.com/
P.S. Cows grazing on grass eat clovers and marigolds and other very beneficial herbs and greens, we get all the benefits from these through their milk. You really can NOT beat that now can you?
I offer advice only because I have twenty years experience of buying and selling tracts of land. First let me say that when you find an interested buyer and he even signs a contract and puts down a deposit, that is only the beginning. If you had contracted a realtor to sell your Texas land for sale, this is where they actually earn their money. It’s a great feeling to have a signed contract on your land but truly that is just the start. If you are surprised by that statement, then you must not have any experience in land deals. You also have to secure financing, negotiate contract terms, agree on a closing time frame, and who gets the mineral rights.
It is very possible to purchase Texas land for sale and not have a single problem with the purchase, but prepare yourself to be one of the few that select the land for sale in Texas that has issues. You don’t have to shy away from properties just because it has issues. Do your homework if you really like the property and figure out how you can use this problem to your advantage or better yet know when to walk away and say no thanks. You will have to spend a little money to be safe, but it will be worth it. Hire an abstractor who can check the title out for any defects. A surveyor can verify your acreage you are trying to purchase and to make sure the fences are really the property lines.
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