Photo courtesy Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture
For nearly a quarter-century, the USDA has been trying to add regulations requiring livestock producers to tag their animals with electronic IDs.
According to the agency, it’s an urgently needed tool for addressing disease outbreaks. In many ranchers’ eyes, it does little to tackle that problem, but does effectively tilt the economic playing field further in favor of giant meatpackers.
Earlier this year, the USDA finally published its final rule on animal ID. The rule went into effect this month – and a collection of ranchers’ groups promptly sued the USDA to delay it.
At the beginning of the 2000s, USDA began pushing its National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The agency wanted livestock owners to attach electronic ID tags to all their animals with electronic ID tags, as well as registering their properties’locations, and filing a report every time they moved livestock.
The proposal generated sustained public resistance. Ranchers and homesteaders cried foul, pointing out that the rule required small operations and homesteaders to tag every last chicken, while allowing large producers to use a single ID for an entire herd.
In 2010, USDA finally withdrew its NAIS proposal. In its place, the agency adopted the Animal Disease Traceability (ADT) Rule. Unlike NAIS, ADT only required individual animal ID tags for animals crossing state lines. It allowed visual ID tags, like those already in use for brucellosis and similar programs, instead of insisting on electronic tags.
Things stayed that way until this May, when USDA published a new rule eliminating the visual-tag option and mandating electronic ID tags – but only for interstate shipments of bison, dairy cattle, and sexually intact beef cattle. One hundred eighty days after the rule was published – at the beginning of this month – it went into effect. Days earlier, a collection of ranchers’ organizations sued the agency to delay the rule’s implementation. That lawsuit is currently in progress.
More information on the rule and the lawsuit is available from plaintiff organizations, including the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA) and R-CALF, as well as from USDA.