A coalition led by farmers and ranchers is using a last-minute strategy to stop USDA’s new Animal Disease Traceability (ADT) program. The groups involved are using economic grounds – especially the added costs that animal identification will impose on rural America. In a 9-page letter to the Executive Office of Management and Budget, a unit…
Animal Traceability Comment Period Extended
Procrastinators are getting an extra 30 days to get their comments in on the new animal traceability rule.
USDA published a notice Friday officially extending the comment period to Dec. 9, moving the deadline forward from the former Nov. 9 date.
About 250 comments have come in so far, and anyone just reading through them …
USDA Has New Scheme to Trace Animal Disease
For most of the past decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
tried to get farmers and ranchers to accept the National Animal
Identification System (NAIS) without success.
NAIS
was to be a high tech solution, with top down coverage of nearly every
critter on the land. But, as everybody in rural America knows, NAIS is…
NAIS Dead, Food Safety Not A Goal
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack killed the $142 million National Animal Identification System (NAIS), and any hope it might contribute to food safety, last week.
At a meeting of state agriculture commissioners, Vilsack said the NAIS as conceived after the discovery of Mad Cow disease in the United States in 2003 had proven to be vastly …
Ag Groups Call for Death to NAIS
One cannot help but wonder if the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has bitten off more than it can chew when it comes to tracking animals.
Five years and $147 million after USDA opted to implement an animal tracking system based on the Australian model, it’s far from a done deal.
In fact, in late …
Letter From The Editor
The first daily newspaper I worked for was about 1,200 miles and a couple of mountain ranges away from where I grew up and went to college.
About half the population of this little city in the West went to the same church and was serious, straight laced, but a generous people. They did most …
NAIS: Simpler Technology Fuels Fire
No sooner have most people pronounced NAIS dead-on-arrival, than a number of recent events may have breathed life back into the U.S.A.’s National Animal Identification Scheme. A combination of market forces aligned with a simplified tracking technology, and some rare positive news may have reinvigorated USDA’s moribund, voluntary animal traceability initiative.
First the news headlines.…
Technology Aids Traceability
In a new white paper published by TraceGains and HCL America, authors William Pape of TraceGains and Ravi Sankar of HCL Technologies Limited offer an analysis of the business implications associated with traceability as required in food safety legislation recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 2749, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s …