USDA-APHIS Holds NAIS Listening Session in Harrisburg

Some of you may have noticed we weren’t at the Westerville Farmers’ Market last Wednesday. Instead, we were in Pennsylvania. I have family there, and it was nice to visit, but the real reason for going was that I attended the NAIS Listening Session in Harrisburg. (There’s another one in Louisville this Friday if anyone with the inclination to go reads this in time.) I had pre-registered online, and got an email telling me that while my pre-registration was confirmed, there was still a limit on the capacity of the room, so even among pre-registered attendees, it would be first-come-first-admitted. They advised I show up early if I wanted to get in.

I didn’t show up early, but it didn’t matter. The parking lot was mostly empty other than several fire trucks that were there for an unrelated event. I told a woman at the registration desk that I had pre-registered online, and it made no difference. “Did you register to speak?” I had, I told her. She handed me a folder with a colored sticker on the outside and a ticket inside. It appeared that everyone got one of these folders. So much for the scary warning about the need to pre-register.

I went into the banquet room where there were probably fewer than a hundred people in what looked to be a space designed for a thousand or more. That “fewer than a hundred” included members of the press, USDA officials, and a handful of security personnel in addition to regular attendees like me. I got a seat to the left of the central aisle, where there were microphones about every 15 feet. In front of me was a woman wearing a T-shirt that read “I LOVE MY COUNTRY. IT’S THE GOVERNMENT I DON’T TRUST” or something to that effect. To my left was a young woman carrying a baby in a sling. The woman with the T-shirt was making it her business to personally accost each person she could before the start of the meeting, as though we were all going to vote and she wanted to make sure we voted the right way. Unfortunately for the cowboy-hatted gentleman sitting next to her, he responded that he really hadn’t taken a position and could see the merit of having some kind of system for tracking diseases. The T-shirt lady got into a heated debate with him–well, heated on her side, at least. When she failed to rattle him, the lady with the baby joined in. I felt bad for him, though I disagreed with most of what he was saying. Just about the time I hopped into the conversation, the meeting started.

The USDA officials spent about an hour giving us their sales pitch for NAIS and explaining the format for the day’s listening session. From 10:00 a.m. until noon, they would draw numbers at random to select people to offer comments which would be recorded into the transcript. I didn’t know what my number was, though. I searched the folder inside and out to determine which number they meant. I finally found a red raffle ticket and figured that must be it. When they started calling the numbers, though, they were two-digit numbers, and the one on my ticket was about seven or eight. They got through maybe eight numbers before the lady drawing the numbers announced, “I’m just going to read the last two numbers since the first ones are all the same.” Whew. It was the right ticket…but what were those first numbers she called? Was one of them mine?

I was really panicked, now. I hadn’t gotten to fully prepare my comments yet, though Mayda did help me review the agenda points on the seven-hour drive from Columbus to my grandparents’ house. I had notes from our discussion, and I was trying to condense the highlights down to the three minutes I would be allowed to speak. Forget the highlights–I wanted to pick out the most useful points that I didn’t figure were likely to be said by everybody else there. Still, it was a struggle to get it down to three minutes. On the drive to Harrisburg from my grandparents’ house Thursday morning, I was rehearsing. I’d set a three-minute timer on my cell phone, and speak extemporaneously on my most important points until the timer went off. Then I’d trim it down and go again. The drive wasn’t long enough, and I was not yet fully prepared as they were calling numbers. I kept writing as I listened to other people speak.

It was clear where most of the people in the room sat on this issue. Most of the speakers were well-informed on the matter and gave excellent arguments. Every time one would point out something absurd about NAIS, the room would erupt in applause, punctuated by one guy sitting near me who couldn’t contain himself (all day) and kept saying, “Yes! Yes!” (Which, on the whole, was much nicer than the guy a couple rows behind me who would periodically declare “Bull shee-yit!” whenever the USDA folks said something.) There were a couple people who got on my nerves: people who either had no opinion but felt they needed to eat up three of the 120 alloted minutes, or people who were so unintelligible they really had nothing useful to say on either side of the issue. There were maybe four people who spoke in favor of NAIS. Predictably, they represented large organizations vested in industrial food.

There were some entertaining moments as well. One woman–Willow Moonbeam or something close to that–who ran a health food store gave a sermon. When she took the mic, she closed her eyes as though to slip into an altered state of consciousness. Then she’d launch forth with an impassioned warning about how we were disappointing our Heavenly Father. There was the young Amish man (I’d say 10% or more of the people there were Amish or Mennonite) who started by asking for a show of hands in the audience of everyone who had milked cows that morning, followed up by asking the panel the same question. He then tried to continue with this Socratic method of illustrating his point only to get set straight by the moderator. “This isn’t really set up to be a question and answer session. The purpose of this listening session is to tell us what you think, using your three minutes to express your views.”

One of the best was the large man in the cowboy hat who started by saying, “Another person who had been called generously yielded me his time, so I’ll be speaking for six minutes.” They didn’t object. His was one of the three best speeches I heard there that day, citing experiences of a friend of his in Australia, where they already have something like NAIS in place. Then they got to the two-and-a-half-minute mark and asked him to wrap up. There was a brief locking of horns as the moderator tried to explain that he was restricted to three minutes and he insisted that he got his extra three fair and square. The crowd, who was almost unanimously behind him, felt like it was about to lose the restraint and civility it had demonstrated up to this point. The moderator finally gave in, but warned the rest of us that we weren’t allowed to cede time. (I’d not heard the phrase before, and it’s only just now as I write this that I realize she wasn’t saying “seed time.”)

As speaker after speaker got called and time was running out, I was growing ever more certain that I had missed my number right at the beginning and wasn’t going to get to speak. Then, finally, I heard it. “49.”

What’s NAIS?

What’s NAIS? You mean you hadn’t heard? It’s hard to remember sometimes that those whose livelihoods and lifestyles don’t circle around livestock may not have heard of this program. Among activists, it’s been described as “the mark of the beast” and a practice run for implementing a totalitarian state. Surrounded by such rhetoric, it’s easy to forget that most of our population has never even heard of this. Let me back up for a moment.

In 2003, a cow imported from Canada to the US was found to have BSE–Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis–or “Mad Cow disease,” as it’s more commonly known. Having seen the horrors of BSE in the United Kingdom, importers of American beef suddenly became disintrested in our offerings. The American beef lobby is a powerful force in Washington, and they insisted something be done. Verichip and other RFID tag makers, hearing opportunity knock, pitched a plan to the USDA. If we would put these radio-tracking tags on every single animal in America, and track their movements by animal owners making regular updates to the database while backing this up with satellite monitoring, we could have a system that would enable epidemiologists to track a disease back to it’s source within 48 hours of discovery, thereby nipping any potential epidemic in the bud.

The USDA thought this sounded like a fantastic idea. More power, more money, and more expensive gadgets–what’s not for a government agency to like? The problem was that such a system would be horrifically, unimaginably expensive. The long-term costs would make the money spent on the Iraq war look like a door prize. Think about this for a moment. All across the whole 3,794,066 square miles of the United States, every cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, llama, chicken, turkey, pony, donkey, alpaca, etc., would have to be tagged with a Radio Frequency ID chip. Each animal owner would have to have equipment for scanning these chips. The would then download the information from the scanner onto their computers, where they would then upload it to a national database. Each animal owner would have to register their premise and be assigned a number. The owners would have to make reports any time an animal entered or exited the premise, and any time an animal was born or died. To make sure the farmers are doing as they’re told, boosters and repeaters would be needed to allow these tags to be read by orbiting satellites. Word was that failure to report any “incident” within 24 hours would be punishible by a fine of $1000 per animal per day.

So how do you pay for all that? First, you externalize as much of the cost as possible by making the animal owners pay for their own equipment. Tags, readers, and any computer equipment or software associated with making the necessary reports would all be the farmers’ responsibility. As for the rest…well, it was just two years after 9/11. If you wanted money then, all you had to do was turn it into an issue of national security. Part of APHIS’ mission statement is to protect us from agricultural bioterrorism. They pushed it through as a Homeland Security issue.

They started this program by making it voluntary. The big producers jumped right on board. It was they, after all, who would benefit by convincing foreign importers that America had a high-tech system to ensure the safety of our meat. It didn’t hurt that they could implement this system pretty painlessly using inventory tracking systems they already had in place. Then “voluntary” started to become a very flexible word. The states were put in charge of enforcement, and some made it mandatory. Now, even on the federal level, people are having their premises involuntarily registered with the USDA under this “voluntary” system. Veterinarians and some others are now obligated, under certain conditions, to submit premise identification information to USDA-APHIS (the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service). People who don’t want to be in this voluntary system, who didn’t volunteer, are now in it and can’t opt out.

So what’s the big deal? Stopping disease is a good thing, isn’t it?

One of the nasty things about NAIS is that it doesn’t do a blessed thing to stop disease. Even if it worked the way it’s supposed to–which preliminary studies have not indicated–it would only show where a disease came from, not where it is now and where it’s going. Think about it like this: imagine there’s a deadly flu passing from person to person. It takes four days after exposure for you to have any symptoms. Ten to fifteen days later, you’re dead. Okay? Now, imagine every single human being had an electronic ear tag, and the government monitored their progress, keeping records back 48 hours. A person goes to the hospital with symptoms of this disease. The tracking system will let the authorities know who else this patient has exposed in the past two days, but they may have been infectious before that. Also, you don’t know where they got infected, because the records don’t go back far enough. You could have a Typhoid Mary who spreads the disease without suffering symptoms, with other people not showing a sniffle until four days after contact. I won’t go so far as to say such a system would be entirely useless, but it doesn’t do what needs to be done. Unless records of every movement of every person are kept permanently, and the government doing the tracking also has the authority to restrict or quarantine any person, they really have no way to stop the spread of this disease. Spending a lot of money and having a lot of farm cops destroying livestock and locking up farmers only serves as a whitewash. A system that big and scary must be effective, right? Have another burger, Japan.

But it’s even more ineffective than that. Many diseases affecting livestock–and I should point out that many of the diseases of concern are non-fatal–are also spread by wildlife and humans. Humans get hoof-and-mouth, too, and it’s no more fatal to us than it is to cattle. Wild birds are one of the biggest vectors for Avian Influenza. Unless you have a means for controlling all of them, too, it’s not worth spending a dime to backtrack these diseases among livestock. Rather, we should put the money into treatment, vaccination, and so forth where it may actually do some good. The USDA, according to many of the farmers at the meeting, is failing miserably in this regard, though. They’ve got their priorities twisted.

The USDA has made a couple very small concessions. Namely, poultry producers will only have to have a number for each flock rather than for each animal. Allegedly, I’d just have to file a report and print out a new bar code every time I get a new shipment of chicks rather than injecting a microchip into each little bird. I said “a couple” concessions, didn’t I? Well, that’s it, really. Just that one. Other than that, they’ve gotten really vague, refusing to discuss “the future of NAIS.” They insist that it’s voluntary, but in the same breath say that it can’t work unless they have 100% participation and start issuing orders to sign people up involuntarily. They also won’t discuss penalties now. We got reminded of that a few times during the meeting. But I digress…you’re up to speed on NAIS now.

I stepped up to the mic, the third from the last speaker, much more anxious than I’d have liked to have been since I had been fretting for most of the morning, and this is what I said…oh, I should mention that the official agenda said the purpose of this meeting was to offer solutions rather than just our concerns:

I’m opposed to NAIS, but you asked for solutions today for creating a system we can live with. This suggest that you’ve already made up your minds to move forward, and that all of the comments of strong opposition here today will simply be disregarded.

With that in mind, it seems to me that the chief beneficiaries of NAIS will be those producing meat for export, whereas most ot the objections seem to be coming from folks like me. I’m a small farmer doing direct, local sales through farmers’ markets and a CSA. My poultry is processed by the only state-inspected, custom poultry processor in the entire state of Ohio. There’s nothing secretive about my operation. My farm is easily located by a simple internet search. If the USDA wants to destroy my flock or check my records, they would save probably less than 30 seconds by having my farm in the NAIS database.

So my participation in NAIS would not benefit me, would not benefit my customers, and would be of only inconsequential benefit to the USDA. The people who would benefit from 100% participation are my larger, already more advantaged competitors like Tyson & Perdue. With the disease control whitewash of NAIS, these large producers will likely see increased sales to foreign buyers. They can then leverage those profits against small producers like me who are selling domestically. It seems reasonable, then, that the companies benefitting from my participation should be paying me for my participation.

By imposing a substantial fee on meat exporters–a “NAIS gains tax,” if you will–and using that to pay subsidies to small, local farmers so that compliance actually results in a profit for these small farmers, you could eliminate many objections to this program.

In summary, those who want this program should pay those of us who don’t want it, rather than forcing us to foot the bill for their inventory tracking system and international PR campaign. That’s all NAIS really amounts to unless you propose to not only track, but also control the movement of not only all livestock in North America, but also of all humans and wildlife as well.

Some noteworthy points from other speakers:

• A number of multi-generational farmers were brought to tears talking about how this program would prevent them from being able to pass their farming operations on to their children and grandchildren.


• A couple of the Amish/Mennonite folks spoke of religious discrimination.


• Several pointed out that all the disease problems have been associated almost exclusively with large operations, not with the little guys running grass-based operations. One of these was the health food store preacher lady who said that disease is God’s way of telling us we’re doing it wrong.


• Australia already has a system like this in place. It’s putting ranchers out of business, causing the bottom to fall out of rural real estate prices there, and isn’t doing a thing to prevent the spread of disease.


• Small producers aren’t the only ones affected by this. Six-minute guy, a large cattle rancher and the only other farmer besides myself who identified himself as being from Ohio, said that a large substantial part of his business is selling stock to new farmers, about 75 of them every year. If that stops, he said, his operation would fold in about four years. (I got his card. I’d like to do beef if we ever get enough land and get this blasted surveillance program shot down.) There was also a manager of a large caged battery hen operation who was equally concerned about costs and government nosiness.


• Officials are saying on one hand that the information gathered under NAIS would only be used for disease control, but then they try to sell it to farmers by saying that it could be used to locate lost or stolen animals.


• The lady with the baby was an activist representing some sort of organization of small farmers. She had been to Washinton to sit in on a presentation to Congress about NAIS. She was personally snubbed by Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack who promised the group a meeting and then never got back to them or even offered to have a representative answer their questions.

There were a couple more speakers after me, then we broke for lunch. After that, we returned and separated into three groups, each of which went to a different room. This part was much more informal. There was a facilitater there to ask questions to extract more detail and move things along, and another official there to pass the microphone around like at a talk show. Everything spoken into the mic was being recorded into their transcript, so it gave everyone who wanted to an opportunity to speak at greater length than the three minutes each alloted in the morning session. We heard some much better, deeper commentary. As things loosened up, people got more personal and more passionate. We started hearing things like “end of our way of life,” “utter disregard for the Constitution and our religious freedom,” “no authority to do this,” and “there’s gonna be blood in the streets.” After so much of that, I decided to stick a fork into the elephant on the table.

I haven’t been farming long. Until a couple years ago, I was a police officer, trained in crisis intervention and hostage negotiation…and the thing that really strikes me about this whole debate is the parallel between this and a suspect barricade situation. On the one hand, we’ve got the authorities saying, “Do what we say or we’re sending in the SWAT team!” and on the other side, you’ve got people feeling scared, trapped, and desperate. In their minds, there’s only two ways this can go: either they’re going to suffer total defeat and end up in an Orwellian police state, or they’re going to somehow get out of it. And the thing is, the more the noose tightens, the closer this comes to becoming mandatory, the more people start to lose any hope of getting out of it. And as they start to lose that hope, they get even more desperate and prone to drastic action.

We saw this in the nineties. When the cultural conservatives felt marginalized and pushed out, like they didn’t have any control over their lives or society anymore, they started forming seperatist groups and joining militias. The government, rather than reaching out and trying to bridge the gap, dug in its heels and got all heavy-handed, and we ended up with Waco and Ruby Ridge. Then the other side dug in and retaliated, and we got Oklahoma City. I don’t want to see this turn into the same thing. I don’t want to see honest farmers turned into militant rebels.

The USDA needs to de-escalate this fast. Lucille mentioned psychology–“Why don’t you have happy farmers lining up for this?” I think she’s right. USDA needs to learn some psychology here and see what they can do to make farmers happier about this. Make us feel less desperate. Open up a two-way conversation where we can talk about concessions or reparations of some kind. Address our fears and show us that they’re unfounded. Show us that NAIS isn’t as bad as we think it’s going to be. I think it’s disingenous for USDA to hold these listening sessions and say we’re not going to discuss the future of NAIS or penalties for noncompliance or anything. We’re scared, and you could put our fears to rest very easily, and you’re not making the least effort, which just puts the farmers in the position of thinking there must really be something there to worry about.

You could put this to rest so easily by trying to reach out to us and build a bridge. NAIS could go forward without having to be a one-size-fits-all solution. On one end, you’ve got a total police state. On the other, you’ve got no NAIS at all. I think there’s a big, broad margin in between there that neither side is even acknowledging. You could have different levels of oversight for different sized producers. For example, in Ohio, poultry producers who produce less than…I think it’s either a thousand or five-thousand birds, can process at home on the farm. More than that, I think up to ten-thousand, you have to use a state-inspected processor. More than that, and you have to use a USDA processor. I think you could do a similar kind of thing with NAIS. Also, show us that our fears aren’t anything to be afraid of. For example, maybe it’ll be mandatory to participate, but non-compliance results in nothing or maybe a little slap on the wrist. Maybe nothing would be enforced unless there was an actual disease tracked back to that farm, or the farmer could be shown to be negligent in some unhealthy practice or something. I just think there’s a lot of room for you to come up with alternatives that would set most people at ease, and you’re not even mentioning them. You’re just leaving people worrying, and I think you need to do better at reaching out and creating a genuine dialogue.

That’s a very liberal paraphrasing. In actuality, that’s a summary of two turns at the mic, and I’m sure it was even more inarticulate. I later offered the specific solution of creating a “Farmers’ Bill of Rights,” similar to the Patients’ Bill of Rights. Guarantee that nobody’s animals will be destroyed or seized unless they are first proven to be infected. Guarantee that you aren’t going to enter a registered premise without permission or a search warrant. Guarantee that if you do have to destroy an animal, the owner will be compensated fair market value.

In the interest of giving balanced coverage, I feel it necessary to point out that one small farmer in our group said he didn’t see NAIS as a big deal. He was already required to participate in the scrapie program since he raised sheep, and it was pretty much the same thing. He didn’t understand why anyone would object unless they had something to hide. Of course, his comments were immediately followed by someone else addressing him and saying that they shouldn’t have to offer any kind of explanation as to why they don’t want this program. In a democracy ruled by the people, it’s enough that they don’t want it. It shouldn’t be forced onto them against their will.