Animal tagging dropped

Facing opposition, the federal government has dropped a six-year voluntary effort to get farmers here and nationwide to tag and trace the movements of livestock.

The system was launched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2004 after a mad cow disease scare in Canada.

The idea was to have a system where the source of a diseased animal could be determined quickly and wide areas of farms or ranches would not have to be quarantined and masses of livestock destroyed.

Some $142 million taxpayer dollars had been spent in its voluntary implementation, so far.

A Denver veterinarian who served on a national committee that supported the National Animal Identification System is sorry that the effort has been discontinued, at least in its current form.

"I'm very disappointed because it puts farmers at a big disadvantage in the exports market. It will continually be used against us in bigger countries," said Dr. Tim Trayer, senior partner in Agricultural Veterinary Associates, whose customers are mostly local dairy farmers.

Trayer, who served on a NAIS committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association, claimed most producers in the cattle, sheep and poultry industry supported the ID and tracing system.

"They realize the industry will be destroyed if — not if, when — we have a major outbreak that requires traceability."

Trayer said the dairy industry had been cooperating in tagging cows and that the industry was ahead of other farming sectors in participating.

"It really is a small segment of the animal industry voicing opposition," Trayer maintained.

In November 2004, the Hershey Brothers Farm near Manheim became the first in the nation to install radio frequency scannable ear tags in 225 dairy cows.

But after a series of public listening sessions around the country, including one attended by area farmers voicing negative comments last May in Harrisburg, USDA announced recently that it would drop the current plans.

Instead, only farms involved in interstate commerce would be required to register their animals. The new direction also will give states more latitude in developing an identification program under USDA guidelines yet to be developed.

USDA estimated 37 percent of the nation's producers had participated in the program.

Don McNutt, administrator of the Lancaster County Conservation District, said he believes some local farmers had concerns about the cost of tagging all livestock.

"It was a little bit of, do we really need this since we've never had a case here," McNutt said.

Trayer said "big government versus the independence of producers" was a factor in some opposition.

Among the agriculture groups opposing the identification system were the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, The Cornucopia Institute and the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund of the United Stockgrowers of America.

Mark O'Neill, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, told Lancaster Farming that he felt the program failed because "there was a lot of bad information out there about what this system was going to do."

The bureau supports a mandatory identification system that is cost-effective, protects producer information and protects producers from liabilities once the animal is off the farm, he said.

acrable@lnpnews.com