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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Farmers and Ranchers Fight NAIS – and Win Written by Ann Shibler Friday, 25 July 2008 12:58 Small farmers, big ranchers, home farmers, animal and pet owners, and food freedom advocates have come together to legally fight implementation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The results are encouraging. Farm and ranch organizations, R-CALF USA being one of the leaders, along with the Farm-to-Consumer Foundation, NoNais.org run by farmer Walter Jeffries in Vermont, Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, and even a few rural newspapers, along with some concerned attorneys, have done yeoman’s service in the fight to oppose the onerous and intrusive NAIS – the program initiated to track and monitor all animals and their movements. R-CALF USA along with several states’ cattlemen’s associations has now accused the USDA of, among other things: improperly acquiring premises registrations by “registering premises without farmer or rancher consent,” by tapping into different states’ agriculture databases and county fair records, and using improper tactics directed at 4-H participants; proceeding without regard to cost, liability and confidentiality concerns for livestock producers; misrepresenting the Privacy Act protections; and of protecting and assisting meatpackers in transferring NAIS information to carcasses, thereby exposing individual producers to liability for problems that occur or are created after the animal leaves the farm. With this in mind, R-CALF and a host of other concerned associations have formally requested leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to halt advancement of NAIS and to conduct oversight hearings on the USDA’s activities. Also, on June 4, 2008, the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, ordered the USDA to suspend its plan to establish by June 9, 2008 a system of records entitled “National Animal Identification System.” The suspension was immediate and indefinite and was the result of a legal case, Mary-Louise Zanoni v. United States Department of Agriculture. Mary-Louise Zanoni is an upstate New York attorney and leading farm activist in the fight to protect the traditional rights of farmers. The suit was filed in an attempt to seek access to the NAIS database to determine its accuracy. The USDA’s proposed NAIS program, incidentally never voted into law by Congress, was supposed to be a three-step “voluntary” program, but in many states it is anything but. Wisconsin farmer Jeff Pausma, who runs a relatively small dairy operation of about 60 cows, received a letter stating that if he did not comply with the Wisconsin NAIS law, he would lose his milk producer license. For Pausma, the expense of having to participate in the program with its mandatory electronic tagging system is quite a bit of a financial burden as well. As a small farmer, every one of his cows must be identified, tagged, and tracked, each with separate numbers. Meanwhile, factory-style mega-farms need only one federal ID number for the whole farm, an injustice clearly in favor of big agribusiness. Another small farm activist group, Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, filed suit on July 14, 2008, also in the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, to stop the USDA and the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) from implementing NAIS as well. The MDA had already implemented the first two steps, namely property registration and animal identification, and the suit asks the court for an injunction to stop NAIS at either the state or federal levels. Fund President Taaron Meikle, who calls the program one that “only a bureaucrat could love,” also says that existing programs for diseases and state laws on branding along with existing record keeping already provide the mechanisms needed for tracking. This new suit charges the USDA with never having published NAIS rules, a violation of the Federal Administrative Procedures Act; never having performed an Environmental Impact Statement or Assessment as required by law; and also violation of religious freedoms guaranteed by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The good news is that the case will be heard by the same judge who ruled in favor of suspending NAIS on June 4. Several states have passed legislation to protect citizens from the massive government-sanctioned program. Nebraska passed a law providing for a procedure for withdrawal from the premise registrations. Kentucky’s law prevents the release of confidential information for the purposes of NAIS. Arizona prohibits mandated or forced participation, and Missouri passed a similar law, with the addition of allowing its citizens to withdraw from the program at any time. But these are just band-aid-sized appeasements. John Wallace, a candidate for Congress in New York’s 20th Congressional District, says the current NAIS program is not about preventing mad cow or other diseases since most contamination happens in the processing plants after the animals have been sold. It is, he says, “about helping big corporate agribusiness and RFID chip manufacturers make bigger profits at the expense of the small family farmers and ranchers. Protecting America’s food supply and preserving the country’s livestock’s resistance to diseases can best be protected by the continued decentralization of our nation’s food production and processing.” Wallace’s conclusion is constitutionally spot-on: For a time it appeared that the NAIS program was going to be a steamroller crushing the rights of citizens. But courageous individuals standing up to the bureaucrats are demonstrating that activism in the name of liberty and freedom can indeed be effective in putting a stop to the march of big government.
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#1. To: farmfriend (#0)
Splendid. Congratulations one and all.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. De La Boétie
Yayyyyyyyyyyy!
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