NAIS for Dummies (like me)

I didn't really understand until today what all the hullabaloo over the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) was about. That changed when I read this article by Shannon Hayes, a New York grass farmer. I honestly always thought the opposition was from a fear-of-the-nanny state. She lays it out from the perspective of the small farmer and what the economic costs would be to her operation. My thoughts were that if you were already putting ear tags on, then slightly more expensive ear tags wouldn't be a deal breaker. But she goes into a lot of things I hadn't thought about like computer fees and scanners.

The other pre-conceived notion I had was that this would create a lot more accountability among factory farm operations. And it might but that ignores a central tenet of her argument -- the factory farms are for the most part the ones creating the health problems by intensively raising meat (esp. swine and chicken) in such squalid conditions. And they are also the only ones who can absorb the cost of this attempt to fix the problem they created in the first place. So the small farmer get pushed out because of a problem he or she had nothing to do with. Not really fair, is it?

Of course, none of my synopsis here will be news to any small farmer that is confronting this issue, but I was glad to finally understand it a little better.