Let's try not to confuse the situation, shall we?

NAIS ( for those of you new to my blog, this is the National Animal Identification System) has been getting a bit of press lately. according to Feedstuffs, there has been press about NAIS being stopped altogether. I however have not seen such articles, What I have seen is the Suspension of Effective Date for the proposed new Privacy Act system of records.
According to Feedstuffs, NAIS remains fully functional . And yet another article by Feedstuffs says that school meat purchases will be NAIS only registered farms. Apparently this will somehow help with recalls from downed cows. Wait, here is were I get confused. According to the USDA, large feedlots do not have to purchase individual tags for their cattle. So if one cow that has the same lot number as thousands of other cows, goes down, is processed then sold, wouldn't you still end up having a massive recall of the beef? You will not know which package of ground chuck was the downed cow. How does this make us safer? Nothing really changes except I will have to spend more money that I don't have to buy useless tags for all my animals, and into a system that I don't think will work, nor do I want, by way of taxes. There is no National Herd, there are ranchers that are kind enough to keep us fed. One would think that you would need to keep these ranchers happy is you want to eat. But what do I know. What I do know is that ion my own state only a few head honchos from the Cattlemen association wants NAIS so that selling overseas (read Japan) will be easier. It has nothing to do with food safety for their own country men. The other's that are against it are afraid to stand up because they would be losing all that cattlemen money. They gritch and moan behind their backs, and it makes me sad.

Onto other things. I watched a program that seemed to be promising the other day. (off the grid) It claimed to be on homesteading, a family purchases land in the backwoods and has 3 months to get it together before winter. This family doesn't have deep pockets and are on a tight budget. So I watched it. Turns out the family is Les Stroud's , you know Survivorman. I am sure the Discovery Channel pays him decently and you could tell when he had all these experts showing up on site. I was a little annoyed listening to him go on about this being real life and that they didn't have a lot of money. And the ads going on about how seemingly poor he was. He does not live paycheck to paycheck like most people do. This farm we are going out to, unless I can pay big bills, no one and I mean no one will come out to it. It is too far from any town. Experts wouldn't even think about coming out to this farm, not unless I had the Discovery Channel on my side. If I was to be really impressed with a documentary on homesteading, it would be a little truer to real life. Homesteaders are a broke bunch of people. Savings disappears with the first major illness. Give me a documentary about the family that lives paycheck to paycheck and are trying to homestead. Oh wait, that's what I do everyday.

I am sure things are difficult for the Stroud Family, but boasting about how little funds one has and yet making major purchases (solar, wind turbines, composting toilets, and a pre-made log cabin that the experts put up, having a helicopter move the lumber in and so forth) doesn't real life make.