Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Gene Hugoson and State Veterinarian Dr. Bill Hartmann sent a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack yesterday asking him … to end “a bogged-down debate” about if NAIS should be implemented and focus instead on practical issues related to the implementation of a modern animal traceability system that provides animal health officials with critical information needed to respond to animal diseases and foodborne illnesses while respecting producers’ concerns for privacy.

The letter suggested that state animal health officials, as first responders to animal diseases, should have a greater involvement in the development and implementation of NAIS. It is vital for state animal health personnel “to build and maintain accurate and updated information systems” with premises registration, animal identification and producer contact information, according to the letter.
-Feedstuffs

Of course, farmers and consumer’s shouldn’t be involved in the discussion. Only the experts, the totalitarian bureaucrats, should be deciding our future. I bow down to their omniscience and benevolence. Not.

9:00-10:00 am Vilsack visiting at:
Bohanan Dairy Farm
945 Penacook Road,
Contoocook, NH 03229
Google map

10:30-12:00 noon Town hall Style Meeting at:
Carter Hill Orchards
73 Carter Hill Road
Concord, NH 03303
Google map

Be nice and be heard.

LA VISTA — As a long procession of critics pounded away at the federal government’s floundering animal identification initiative Tuesday, federal veterinarian Dave Morris sat in the back of the room, mostly expressionless and sometimes occupied with his cell phone. It would be easy enough to believe that Morris, of the national program staff in Riverdale, Md., was texting somebody to “Beam me up, Scotty.”

“I think this one was consistent with many of the others,” he said later of the 14th and final listening session held across the country. The government’s long listen is aimed at overhauling a widely unpopular program launched five years ago.
:
To [cattle producers], the livestock identification plan is a government invasion that’s likely to become mandatory, add to their cost of production and infringe on their ability to run their operations as they see fit.
:
“For all us producers, this is our livelihood. We know these cows. We have health records on these cows.”

Although she tried to refuse a number, Stec said, she got one — and her cows got ear tags with government numbers, too — as a state and federal veterinary team conducted TB tests at her ranch.
:
Vinton worries animal identification will lead to situations in which he and his peers will be blamed for meat contamination problems that aren’t their fault.
:
The Nebraska Cattlemen, Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation and Nebraska Farmers Union also testified Tuesday and suggested the problems dogging the identification program could be, and should be, fixed.
:
-JournalStar

The FB continues to not ‘get’ it. We don’t want to fix NAIS. We want to eliminate it. When I fix a pig it isn’t going to reproduce. We don’t need the government fixing farmers.

Well, the listening sessions are over. The USDA has been told loud and clear that NAIS needs to be killed dead with a silver bullet, a stake driven through it’s heart, the head severed and the blood drained. We don’t want this this zombie resurrecting itself and coming after us in the future. Time to kill the monster.

Have at it, communicate and keep up the good fight!

Cheers,

-WalterJ

National Animal Identification System.–The Committee recommendation eliminates funding for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). After receiving $142,000,000 in funding since fiscal year 2004, APHIS has yet to put into operation an effective national system that would provide needed animal health and livestock market benefits. The Committee is aware that USDA is conducting a public listening tour around the country for several months to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how to design and deliver a successful animal identification system. Until USDA finishes its listening sessions and provides details as to how it will implement an improved animal identification system, continued investments into the current NAIS are unwarranted.
-Ag Bill 2010

NAIS is unfunded. Lets keep it that way.

June 30
Embassy Suites Omaha – LaVista
12520 Westport Parkway
La Vista, NE 68128

I have not yet found the times. 8 am registration? Be early, bring a book.

Stakeholders may pre-register for a session here NAISSessions@aphis.usda.gov.

Comments can also be submitted electronically.

Be there or be tagged.

Minnesota cattlemen want NAIS scrapped, government intrusion ended
Matt Bewley,Agweek
Published: 06/29/2009
FERGUS FALLS, Minn. — Minnesota cattle producers are bristling at the idea of the U.S. Department or Agriculture imposing the National Animal Identification System on the livestock industry and of further government intrusion in their business.
“The biggest solution in agriculture is to get the government out of it,” says cattle producer Jerry Enderline of Fergus Falls, Minn. “Out of the grain business, out of the livestock business — completely out.”
Enderline is a strong supporter of free trade and says he hasn’t been able to make a profit feeding cattle for 10 months. He says he resents government intrusion into his industry and the fact that he does not have the final word on some issues regarding is own operations.
:
USDA has been sponsoring listening sessions on the subject of NAIS to gain input from the public. But R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard says these sessions are designed to hear suggestions for improving the identification system, rather than outright objections to implementation of the system.
“If USDA is allowed to frame the debate to that of focusing only on how to fix NAIS, then our ability to stop NAIS in its tracks is weakened,” he says.
Bullard goes on to say that once NAIS is “scrapped completely,” then U.S. livestock producers will be prepared to work with USDA to develop an overall strategy for prevention, control and eradication of livestock disease and to develop separate strategies to improve the safety of meat.
:
Elfering sums up his feelings this way: “The government’s just always looking for another way to make a buck.”
-AgWeek

It is good to see how independent farmers are coming to an unanimous conclusion: Scrap NAIS. Less government would still be too much.

“Among all the different types of livestock, cattle have the most pressing need for improved records, said Mr. Hammerschmidt, who added that some opponents were misinformed. “It’s never been our intent to implant chickens, especially chicks,” he said. “People out there are saying that they have to microchip every chicken, and if that chicken crosses the road they’ll have to report that event to the government. That has really stirred the pot.””

Actually, it was the USDA’s own Dr. Weimers that said it:

“[A] nugget from Weimers: He told the activist from Wisconsin, “We will drive every road in the country and find every animal.””

See:
NoNAIS on Weimers
Jolley on Weimers

Once again the USDA is lying through it’s teeth when it disclaims stirring the pot on this issue by using such rhetoric. They used to be very gung-ho mandatory. Now they understand there is real resistance so they’re soft pedaling it. What they need to be doing is back pedaling and fast. NAIS should be a private, voluntary program paid for by those who benefit - the exporters. Even the USDA has said that NAIS is not about disease control in a FOIA response.

Participants in swine shows and exhibits will be required to have an official premise identification card issued by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry effective August 1. Officials say the rule will protect both economic and social interests.

“This is a very proactive step that lets Oklahomans decide how best to protect the health of our citizens, our livestock industry and our livestock show industry,” said Governor Brad Henry. “Suggestions were made earlier by the Centers for Disease Control and some commercial producers to eliminate swine shows completely, but this is a much better alternative that lets our 4-H and FFA members compete in livestock shows.”

Even though the Novel Influenza A-H1N1 is not known to exist in any U.S. swine herd, it is possible that a person with an influenza virus could transmit the disease to swine. State Secretary of Agriculture, Terry Peach, said if an influenza outbreak were to occur, rapid tracking of infected animals and animals they could have been in contact with would be critical to containing the disease.

“This is a tool we will need if an outbreak of influenza were to strike our state,” he said. “We are simply preparing ourselves in advance.”
:
Premise identification is already required at many swine shows including the Fall Classic held in Duncan annually. Arizona, Colorado and Ohio also require premise identification for participants.
-AgBlog-OK

Note how they are using the recent A-H1N1 flu scare to justify their destruction of the Constitution. FUD.

By the way, you can leave comments at that official OK Blog. Keep it polite.

Here’s my comment on their blog:

Tricky way to make “voluntary” mandatory. NAIS only benefits the exporters, Big Ag, government and tag makers. It should not be mandated on small farmers and homesteaders. Our Constitution continues to erode.

Care to make bets as to whether they dare to post comments that dissent from the official state policy or will they govern like China, by force and censorship?

Were the UDA sessions designed to decoy livestock and land owners from the real issues? Opposition to NAIS in the USDA listening sessions is over 95% against it. The violent hate displayed toward USDA is almost unbelievable? What has the USDA done to make the world’s most peaceful and productive farmers explode into battle mode? Obviously apparent is the depth of farmers’ desperation about NAIS.

The listening sessions are running their course. Farmers want to know “What now?” Will livestock owners who testified opposing NAIS have any voice in totally killing it? If NAIS is rejected by the feds, will it dump train loads of congressional egg-on-the-face of USDA? Is it now just a USDA ego thing? They have spent over $150,000,000 and the pig won’t fly.

I’ve taken “loss of freedom” as an expression of outrage at the bureaucratizing of farming, or a way of talking about huge governmental overreach, or the use of conservative or libertarian language to describe loss of personal, democratic or constitutional rights.

I was in the midst of trying to convey why the effort to stop the bills in Congress now (and still coming) must be centrally focused on farmers themselves and not on other people’s food, when I found myself saying, “Is this about farm slavery?” Is NAIS dead and so-called food safety laws ready to replace it with an even more serious enforcement?

Given that an obvious form of enslavement is at stake, it’s reasonable for farmers to seek reassurance that no accidental acceptance of any portion of the food safety bills will happen?

It was only after writing this that I was jerked up by my own words and suddenly experienced them as neither symbolic nor hyperbole. It struck me then that we are in fact looking at a cold-blooded new form of slavery.

I have always assumed that slavery was an historic event which we have rejected. I see our cultural repulsion at continuing forms of slavery as a sign of civilization having learned lessons about slavery and being committed now to stopping it in every form wherever it still exists.

So, it was not easy to recognize that so called food safety bills being introduced are an actual form of enslavement of a whole class of people. What other word would people use to describe controls imposed on people that define work they must perform, computer entries to be recorded daily, down to the most extreme detail, or suffer penalties as high as $500,000 and ten years in prison for mere infractions?

USDA lists 33 NAIS species for possible disease communications. Although people are a major carrier of TB, horses and 32 other species will not escape entrapment just because it is labeled “food safety.”

I’ve been writing variations on those words for sometime. Why did it take so long for the light to dawn? NAIS is more than bad, it is more than terrible, it is more than insane - it is astoundingly immoral. It is truly slavery. We hear the “white shirted” USDA posturing on safe food, traceability, world trade, and pandemic fear. These flawed theories must be replaced with facts of reality and the retch and torture of NAIS enslavement for every farm family.

Along with NAIS comes “best farming practices” which would force a person on their own land to feed their own animals what the government determines, to treat them medically as the government decrees, to chemically spray the land as, and when, and with what the government orders.

Perhaps if it were only applied to one aspect of someone’s life, it might be called tyranny. What is being proposed comes down on farmers where they live and on what they do and on all they own and on what defines them as people, it is deeper than “mere” tyranny. It is theft of all meaning and reduction to operating against one’s will, against one’s knowledge, against one’s land, against one’s animals, against one’s needs, against one’s being and against one’s generational heritage.

We are used to seeing things in a familiar shape - slavery as a black man in forced labor, imperialism as foreigners on someone else’s soil and ruling by guns and fiat. So, it is easy to be fooled to believe that what is happening in agriculture is no relation to this. Today’s new master, globalization, is a result of our elected officials giving away OUR rights without getting OUR permission. As NAIS can, may and hopefully will die, now the same enemy to freedom and American farm food production is already planned to choke the same people with a 1Pennyroyal cure.

USDA knew by their own numerous polls, years ago, that if the “paying ones” were allowed a voice, NAIS would meet it’s Grim Reaper.

As they knew the end of NAIS was only about letting the peasants speak, Machiavellian pawns like Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and Collin Peterson were inking HR2749, with their 2co-verdugos. Under the facade of fake “food safety” it is unbelievably more vicious than NAIS. Using the words “trace of food” therein is the hidden, polished over, nasty head of an NAIS. As smells of the Patriot Act and an “emergency declaration” which USDA could declare, NAIS plus more could be enforced.

DeLauro and Peterson are “vultures of a feather.” They will do nothing that would stop or slow down mandatory NAIS implementation. Any red herring they toss the media will be a faustian impulse, and any budget cut will be accidental or fungible. NAIS is also camouflaged in HR 875, HR759, HR814, HR1332, S425, S510 and numerous other proposed enslavements. NAIS is clearly illustrated in HR814, and broad government code words like “non specific” “all foods” “transport of all foods” is where the other traps are set.

Shall we strip away our familiar templates and recognize that their fake “food safety” bills are just pestiferous deceptions. We are looking at multinational corporations as true totalitarian masters actually setting up to take over the land from farmers and control them as thoroughly as slaves were ever controlled, threatening their lives and all they hold dear if they do not obey. But it has been such a slick thing how these masters of “campaign donations” present themselves - in boardrooms, with our financially thirsty bureaucrats and politicians, running our agencies, in our courts, in science laboratories - that we miss the brutal, ugly, cruel, immoral reality—-it is a plan for all-out farm slavery!

DeLauro, who has never profitably bought sold or owned a single head of the 33 targeted species recently described the over 3,000,000 US livestock owners who refuse to surrender to NAIS as, “fool hearted” and “misinformed.”

Take action now with your elected employees. Although totally novice, their desire to regulate and rule US livestock producers is as real as a snake bite!

1The Pennyroyal herb is a well-known abortificant which causes the uterine muscles to contract. It was successfully used in early America by whores to abort. Was mostly discontinued due to the frequent death of the user.

2Verdugo - Spanish - executioner (de preso); hangman (que ahorca)

www.naisSTINKS.com