I found it brilliant that the media in all their power has chosen to ignore, or pretty up NAIS. Occasionally an article will come out that will highlight the negatives of the program, but today is not one of those days.
The Summit Daily News has released an article about The State Fair Board of Colorado standing behind their decision to require all people that choose to auction their animals at state fairs to have a premise ID. Do you remember when I said that even if you live in a condo, and your 4Her raised 1 rabbit that your little condo would have to be registered as a farm? Here it is, this is what this federally voluntary program is causing states to do. (Like Illinois recently) The article I would like you to see is entitled State Fair stands by premise ID policy. I think I will be the doom on you person today.
What this very short tidbit of an article doesn't say is that Premise id isn't about tracking animals for disease, it's about know what your are doing on your land. It is the NAIS portion of the program that will track. The Summit Daily News states "Supporters say the "premise ID" portion of the NAIS allows animals to be tracked relatively quickly in case of an animal disease outbreak." I know they have a fact checker somewhere.
Now I am not going to sit here and nit pick this small article to pieces, I will allow you to do that. I only have one other important bit of info to add to this.
"Two exhibitors were disqualified from the state fair this year because their premises weren't properly registered" Let's take a step back and look at this innocently written statement, exhibitors, disqualified? Here is when I say they like to pretty things up. I think a more accurate statement would have been, 2 members of 4H were escorted off Fair Grounds by security early this year when it was brought to the boards attention that the children's parents were not signed up with the premise ID registration and refused to do so.
Now the Brownfield Network is reporting that the NCBA will push for NAIS in their Magazine, USDA teams with NCBA on premises registration. The only thing I really have to say is, well read this last line from the article. On the other hand, Wisconsin has the sixth largest group of premises to register. And according to the statistics released by APHIS last week, Wisconsin has already registered more premises, 115%, than USDA has records for. umm...does this bother anyone else? The USDA does NOT have records for these registrations? But APHIS does? I know that APHIS is the main reason we have NAIS coming down strong, well besides big business and their overwhelming need to sell overseas. But why would they have 2 different sets of records. If the USDA isn't overseeing this like we all thought, is APHIS the true mis- informer here?
APHIS:To protect the health and value of American agriculture and natural resources. What confuses me is that people want to help animals, yet wish to implant something that the Dutch have linked with cancer is horses. How exactly is this better? They wish to protect animals yet show up on a farm and "depopulate" an entire healthy herd on a suspicion. More then once I might add.
A while back there was talk of some underhanded legalized tricking of poor farmers to sign up their farms. It was a farm census that was sent out. Farmers and ranchers were a little uneasy about this. The census wasn't due, yet here it was arriving at there doorstep. Another form of legalized trickery, is not bothering to inform the people that Premise ID or NAIS will affect.
Tim over on Applehead is at his new job recently received a letter from his senator. Please, share yours with us. Many of us are interested in what they are saying about NAIS.
7 comments:
thanks for the link! I should wonder what will happen when fellow West Virginians are forced to register their premises. The last time I checked, many West Virginians are pretty uptight when it comes to their land and any part of the gov't getting involved.
You are welcome Tim. I thought the same thing about Texas, and a few other states. But the money seems to out weight the people. Sad.
This is just disturbing to me to no end. With NAIS, smallholders are the only ones who are going to be affected--which is probably what the goal of the program is---you know, you can't be horning in on the industrial animal farms....
We recieved one of these odd farm census' awhile back. Because it was adressed to my husbands grandfather and there was no longer large livestock here on the farm, we ignored it. Another one came in the mail, this time laced with threats if we did not comply. Eric called the number (it was really vague, and hard to figure out where this census was coming from.) and they asked all kinds of questions about what types of animals we had here right down to chickens or rabbits. (of course, we didn't have any ;) And after that they left us alone. It seemed very suspicious to us.
I just said this on the Dec 5 post, but isn't is a bit (ok, cynically) funny that the next owners of the condo would also be registered as a farm. Picture some prissy person allergic to animal dander being premise registered as a FARM!!!!
Shauna, it isn't just the smallholders, people that buy food will be affected by NAIS as well. Food prices will skyrocket to either off set the costs of NAIS, or because there is no more competition.
Farm mom, ~shiver~
gina, yep, and that will tick someone off.
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