NAIS is already costing over $50,000,000 per year of the USDA’s budget and that is even before the system has started to be implemented.
On top of that is the cost to farmers of several dollars per animal for tags plus premise registration each year, equipment, time to do record keeping and reporting. Figuring a small farmer or homesteader will easily have over 500 events per year at minimal wage of $7 per hour and 3 minutes per event we’re talking 1,500 minutes or 25 hours which costs $175. Add in the premise ID fees. There may be fees for each report made as well. Plus the cost of the tags. Each farmer is looking at a cost of over $500 extra per year plus equipment. Multiply that times 2,000,000 small farmers for a cost of $1,000,000,000 per year to small farmers. That is one Billion dollars per year.
Add to that the similar cost for homesteaders who far out number the small farmers but don’t keep as many animals. Remember, everyone keeping even one single chicken for eggs, even a horse, even a lawn ornament sheep must join NAIS. Before you know it we’re starting to talk real money. Figure a minimum of $5,000,000,000 annual cost for NAIS to small farmers and homesteaders.
Minimum price tag of NAIS = $5,000,000,000. Wow!
That is just the cost to small farmers and homesteaders. This comes out of their pocket. There is no advantage. They won’t get paid any extra bonus for their livestock just because it is tagged. There is no premium for trace-back because everyone is mandated to have to do it. This is what they will be forced to pay in order to do what they’ve been doing all along. There is no benefit to small farmers and homesteaders. All we see is an extra $500 in expenses per year per small family farm or homestead family. Since most are in the lower income bracket that is $500 that may not be available. Tax breaks for the rich and soak the poor and middle class. Excellent.
The government is probably going to spend that much again but they have stated they expect producers to pay the majority of the costs. Imagine actually tracking every single animal in the United States. They can’t even keep track of the illegal aliens. Keep in mind the old oxymoron about “Government Efficiency.” I estimate the government will waste $10 billion on NAIS. This means we’ll all be paying higher taxes.
Larger farmers are going to have some costs too although not as much since they get to use batch ID’s for large groups of animals while small farmers are going to have to individually ID and track every single individual animal.
So the total cost will likely be somewhere on the order of $15,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000 per year spent on NAIS. The RFID tagging companies are salivating at this enormous mandated market! They get to dip their scaly little hands into our pockets by law.
So, how much do these reptiles get to pick our pockets for? Figure $211 per family per year. That is an extra tax on every person. I vaguely remember promises of “No New Taxes” but then that is nothing new. Instead they hide them in user fees and other ways of raising our cost of living. With an average age of 75 years we’re talking $15,825 per life-time in 2006 dollars - adjust that upwards for inflation and boondoggle factors to $50,422 per family life-time at a nominal 3.5% rate of inflation by the year 2080.
15 billion dollars per year… In one form or another much of this gets passed on to the consumer be it through higher food prices or taxes to support the new layer of bureaucracy.
For this enormous cost what will we get?
- Food security? No.
- Protection from terrorists? No.
- Better quality food? No.
- More food producers? No.
- Bio-diversity? No.
What NAIS would give us is:
- Micro-management of our lives by the government.
- Increases in our cost of living and doing business.
- Erosion of our Constitutional rights.
- Loss of our privacy.
- Reductions in bio-diversity.
- Centralization of control of our national food supply in to the hands of fewer and fewer larger and larger corporations.
- Factory farms that are more susceptible to terrorism.
Is this what we want?!?
I don’t. Do you?
Just say No to NAIS!
I used a different method to estimate NAIS cost, but interestingly came to a similar bottom line.
If you use USDA’s census of agriculture as a start point, there are about 1 Billion farm animals in the U.S. That is about 4 times the number of people counted by the last census. But many of the animals are meat animals that will have multiple datapoints per animal per year (birth, move, slaughter). So we’re looking at approximately the same number of datapoints as the 2000 U.S. population census…with the same number of folks required to “visit households” and gather data from folks who are, for various reasons, non-cooperative. So, the 2000 US census cost $4.5 Billion, and we’re looking at the same effort year in and year out…plus inflation. So $4.5B - $5 B per year is a decent estimate. We could sure buy better security with that money than NAIS will supply.
Comment Bkeepr — February 19, 2006 @ 10:45 am
I think your cost estimate is too low Walter. I have heardother estimates over $33 billion per year between government and farmer costs. And that didnt even include the costs associated with the people raising their own animals for their own food so the reel cost is much higher. This is just going to push the cost of doing bizness up higher and that will make everyone poorer exept for the companies doing the meat exporting and selling the RFID Chips and machines and stuff like that. They will make out like bandits. I would hazard to gess this is going to cost the average houshold more like $1000 per year in higher food prices. And that is before we see prices jacked up when the big companies lock up their monopolies as the small producers are forced out of business and everyone has to buy from the big ones. Lots of people don’t have a extra thousand a year to spend on food. This isnt just our freedoms and rights but our basic cost of living to.
Comment Mark Volen — February 19, 2006 @ 11:28 am
Ouch! I dont even have animals. Im just a wonnabe but this thing is going to affect me in the pocketbook to. Bad that theyre killing off the local farmers where I get my food but senslessly jacking up our cost of food is too much. Ya Im a cliff dweller but I think NAIS should be dumped along with the idiots who came up with the idea.
Comment P.V. — February 19, 2006 @ 5:10 pm
Here are some interesting links we found written by a lawyer opposed to NAIS and a grassroots organization that is beign formed as a result called Farm For Life.
link
link
Comment JM's Wife — February 20, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
Additional cost that can be added. Simply have a program written to fill out the web based form that is supposedly going to be provided for use with NAIS. Then get a bunch of people with animals to have “incidents” (just drive your animals on and off your property a few times or other imaginative methods). Then everyone reports (using the automated high-speed program). Key words are malicious compliance and denial of service. Bring down the servers and clog the internet.
Comment Anon — February 20, 2006 @ 6:10 pm
YOU GUYS GOTTA LOOK AT THE REAL REASON FOR THIS CRAP. THIS JUST THE BEGINNING. CARS HAVE ON STAR, CELL PHONES HAVE GPS, ANIMALS GET CHIPS AND THE NEXT THING THATS GONNA HAPPEN IS PEOPLE ARE GONNA GET CHIPS TO. THAT WAY THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS WHERE ALL ITS PROPERTY IS. “NONE ARE MORE HOPELESSLY ENSLAVED THAN THOSE WHO FALSELY BELIEVE THEY ARE FREE”
Comment ken — February 21, 2006 @ 11:56 pm