The Truth About the Animal ID Plan
(Page 3 of 7)
June/July 2007
By Jack Kittredge
Other members of NIAA are meat producers, and their interest in the ID plan is harder to discern — until you understand their dependence on factory farming and exports.
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Factory farming. These producers are not farmers in any normal sense. They are large corporations that raise, kill and process animals on a massive scale. The term “factory farm” has sometimes been applied to their operations, but more descriptive is the USDA’s jargon, “concentrated animal feeding operation,” or CAFO. These are huge facilities where animals are penned or caged by the thousands. Poultry and hogs are raised entirely indoors. Beef cattle are confined in feedlots. Feed grown elsewhere is brought in and distributed to the animals mechanically; manure is scraped or pumped out and stored in large lagoons or discharged into waterways. Systems are automatic and computer controlled; animals are identified by individual or by lot; everything is monitored. Thus to factory farm owners, the animal ID requirements are not an additional burden — these costs are already a part of doing business.
Meat exporting. These producers sell much of their product into export markets. Before the 2003 case of mad cow in the United States, Japan imported more than 400,000 tons of U.S. beef annually. This was high-value beef, too, priced 33 percent per pound higher than beef exported to other nations. After the mad cow discovery, Japan shut down imports of U.S. beef for two years. Since 2003, because of this disease concern, U.S. beef producers have lost more than $5 billion in sales to the Japanese. The big corporations that dominate U.S. meat production have a vital interest in the perception in export markets that our meat is disease-free. A program such as the animal ID plan makes the United States appear serious about preventing disease, whatever the reality.
WHAT DO SMALL FARMERS THINK?
So, if the federal animal ID program is designed in a way that imposes few new costs on factory farms and bolsters their export market by giving the perception of safety to foreign meat buyers, how does the program sit with small farmers and backyard animal raisers? Very badly, as it turns out, for several reasons.
It’s too expensive. Whereas factory farms can take advantage of group or lot registration, and already are monitoring and tracking animals, the federal program would impose serious new costs for most small livestock operations. The USDA’s draft plan avoided estimating the costs to producers of implementing the system. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations, based largely on existing devices for cattle identification, give us an idea of the potential costs. ID chips sell for between $1.50 and $3 each, based on quantity. A simple machine to read the tags could cost as little as $100 to $200, while more sophisticated ones with computers and software attached could range from $500 to $2,000. Reporting animal movements would probably be done on the Internet, and would involve costs for Internet access, subscription fees to access the database, and time to do the work. One study suggests these might collectively cost $900 to $1,000 per year. So for a small farm with a herd of 50 cattle, the cost might be $1,500.
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