Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System (NAIS) say that
computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry, that small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, and that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database anyway. "Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture," says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS with one group issuing a bumper sticker that reads, "Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon." "They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this," says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. "This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.""
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