Mike Callicrate on NAIS and USDA’s Wrong Focus


Creative Commons License photo credit: kdinuraj

Blogger Mike Callicrate asks the central question about food safety:

“Will we eat from our own backyards or beg food from big agribusiness?

“Even with the specter of Mad Cow disease, USDA continues to block routine testing and allows processors to grind the brain and spinal tissue of domestic and imported animals into our sausage and ground beef patties. (AMR, or Advanced Meat Recovery, optimizes meat yield through a special process of pulverizing meat and bone scraps into a paste which is pelleted and added to many meat products.)”

An open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack:

By Mike Callicrate

Pulitzer Prize winning author Charles Simic once wrote, “Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.”

As our precious few independent livestock producers and small processors continue their losing fight for survival, the USDA dreams up even more ways to make their lives more difficult. These are the people producing the safest, highest quality and most dependable food for our tables. As we sit here today at this listening session in Greeley, Colorado, considering the depressing possibility and cost of tracing back every healthy animal to its home of origin so Tyson, Cargill and JBS can export more, the farmer and rancher with the heaviest workload and the least income will pay - and down the road - consumers will also pay.

Today, USDA, in protecting the biggest and dirtiest meat plants, continues to block trace-back of pathogens to the source plant, a very easy and inexpensive measure that could improve food safety tomorrow - and you say instead you want to track healthy animals back to the farm! Where USDA’s farm-to-kill plant NAIS ends, contamination and food degradation begins. What do you call an agency that actively undermines a nation’s ability to feed itself? What term defines an agency that sells out its mission to serve and protect the people in favor of serving higher profits of multinational agribusiness corporations? Stupid would be a kind choice of words.

Thinking about NAIS and possible ways to improve food safety and disease traceability, we might reflect back to 2002 when we experienced one of the biggest meat recalls in our history. From here we can almost see the Greeley packing plant, from which the nearly 20 million pounds of E. coli tainted beef was shipped across the U.S. to unsuspecting eaters. Having experienced this and many other catastrophic failures in our nation’s food safety system, USDA actually continues to do even less to protect our food supply. USDA has done nothing to address the problems in the big packing plants where E. coli is systematically put into our meat daily while trusting these big profit-driven companies to self inspect under the HACCP hoax. You may ask why meat cooking companies like Advance Foods, a major supplier to the school lunch program, are doing so well and expanding their facilities? Might it be due to the growing supply of cheap E. coli tainted meat, marked “FOR COOKING ONLY”?

Thanks to USDA antitrust cops and inspectors sleeping on the job, Americans now eat meat from essentially four big meat packers, running faster chains with inexperienced workers suffering high injury rates, resulting in even more meat contamination. USDA has ignored the existing laws and rules designed to protect our markets and keep our food safe, in favor of rules and policies that make big packers and processors more money and more market advantage over smaller independent processors. Why does USDA want to track every healthy U.S. animal and ignore the current foreign animal disease threats? Why does USDA fail to properly implement our own county of origin labeling law while refusing to inspect or even care about the origin of imported cattle? Even with the specter of Mad Cow disease, USDA continues to block routine testing and allows processors to grind the brain and spinal tissue of domestic and imported animals into our sausage and ground beef patties. (AMR, or Advanced Meat Recovery, optimizes meat yield through a special process of pulverizing meat and bone scraps into a paste which is pelleted and added to many meat products.)

Why would USDA pursue this expensive and unnecessary ID system, under the pretense of improving food safety, when machine tenderizers and injectors (making tough meat from implanted and low quality cattle more tender) are punching pathogens that reside on the surface of primal cuts of meat (normally killed with minimal cooking) into the middle of our rare and medium rare steaks without so much as a “COOK TO WELL DONE” warning label?

Could USDA possibly have the dreaded and highly contagious disease known as covering-your-butt-with-heaps-of-paperwork? You want to spread this “I-covered-my-butt-so-it’s-not-my-fault” plague down the food chain from your comfortable perch in Washington D.C. to your inspectors, who shuffle paper all day, instead of inspecting cattle and meat, to those of us who are breaking our backs raising the livestock. We don’t have time for it. In many cases we are working two off-farm jobs while trying to keep our operations afloat. Non-factory, independent family farmers and ranchers produce safe and wholesome food. Why don’t you make sure it stays that way?

You say that NAIS will increase our ability to export. Why does our government continue its march of folly towards increased globalization, appeasing the WTO and their multinational corporations, while blocking U.S. farmers and ranchers fair access to better markets here at home? Past and present history, from Ireland to Canada, has recorded the dramatic social declines and economic failures of export oriented agriculture.

I suggest to you today that rather than facilitating the profit over people WTO mission of increasing the miles that food travels around the globe with NAIS, that we support a new policy that enables people everywhere, through local food production and processing infrastructures, to eat food from their own backyards, communities and regions. It is time to give up on the folly of corporate controlled, bigger-is-better factory agriculture. It is time to reverse the current pandemic of “free trade” that survives only due to government support and the anticompetitive, abusive rules and regulations like NAIS.

I suggest that people everywhere would not only be better off without NAIS, but also without the WTO and the global corporations it serves. I suggest that this administration honor its promise of CHANGE and begin by ordering USDA to support those who make and grow things here at home. We should support our main streets and rural communities where our nation’s wealth is created, instead of Wall Street where our nation’s wealth is stolen.  Instead of wasting precious resources and our time to identify and track every healthy animal in America, let’s protect against the real sources of disease and causes of economic and social decline.

Corporate power over policy and the so-called cheap factory foods are the real threat to our well-being, making people everywhere sicker, poorer and more dependent on low quality imported food? What do you call something that is so contrary to our self interest like NAIS?

Here is a petition to sign if you want to take action to protect local food production.

Mike Callicrate

Mike Callicrate is an independent cattle producer, business entrepreneur and political activist, particularly outspoken in addressing the rural and social impacts of current economic trends. Mike owns a natural meat market in Colorado Springs, where he markets his own and other producers naturally raised, high quality meats, local produce and other healthy food products.

Read his blog: No Bull

Visit his website: www.ranchfoodsdirect.com

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays on the FoodRenegade.com blog, click here for more blog carnival articles!

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Comments

  1. Hi Kimberly, I think it’s great how much attention you’re giving to NAIS. I completely agree with Mike’s letter. NAIS is “stupid.” As he said, it simply legitimizes poor farming practices and discourages the sustainable and responsible practices that truly improve food safety.

    Vin | NaturalBias.com’s last blog post..The Forgotten Path to Health and Happiness

    • Kimberly Hartke says:

      Thanks Vin-I am amazed at the lack of attention this story is getting by the mainstream media. This program is a huge power grab by the bureaucracy for control of the citizenry. It will affect every living American, yet only us who have informed ourselves know that it is happening. The media would rather focus on more important stories like Sasha and Melia go to Paris, and what the family pet is doing at the White House while they are gone! Not that I don’t enjoy stories like that, its just maddening that NAIS is a non-issue to the mainstream media. Perhaps blog articles like this will change that! Thanks for your support!

  2. Great guest post, Kimberley! Thanks for sharing it today. We really need to get the word out about NAIS, and there’s no better way to do it than by listening to the the producers who will be most affected by it.

    All the best,
    KristenM
    (AKA FoodRenegade)

    FoodRenegade’s last blog post..Fight Back Fridays June 5th

  3. robert Burns says:

    I have developed a personal and confrontational attack on our Connecticut Department of Health(DPH) wherein they have called our Farm Bureau executive director and told them “I am afraid of this guy”…the fear of course has nothing to do with me.My presence is only a mirror reflecting the criminal behavior of the Connecticut DPH over the years, whose lies and innuendos have cost farmers millions of dollars in loss with false allegatons leaked to the press (they didnt do it).
    The governor is trying to smother farmers by developing independent health districts and she is trying to make it illegal for Municipalities to have independent sanitation engineers (i.e. health inspectors) to form a state run colation to squash small farmers at farmers markets, farmstands, and on their farms themselves.
    their draconian Methods ignore a 200 year perfect health record at farmers markets where the stewardship of the farmer far outweighs anything any health official can dig up.These are greedy ignorant folks,who spout story book rehetoric,and try to takeover tngs that dont concern them, whiile they ignore their assigned duties.
    The worst of it is THEY GIVE US GRANTS, THEN WIPE US OUT…What a set up. When I chalenged House Bill 875 crafted by Connecticut Congresswoman DeLauro written to wipe out small farms i was told by her staff,”You are crazy, look at all the grants she has obtained for you….
    Like the steak dinner before the execution of the condemned……the agenda,be it to wipe out small farmers, or complete the execution is still in place.
    Robert Burns
    Legslative & Membership Chair
    New London County farm Bureeau
    769 Shewville Rd
    Ledyard, Connectiicut 06339

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  1. [...] and Fatty Acid Balance7. Forgotten Path to Health and Happiness (Vin - NaturalBias.com)8. Kimberly -No Bull on NAIS9. Squash Are Happening10. The Chicken Coop-homemade breakfast sausage11. Mindy 12. How to Make [...]

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