I.D.ology "treats cows as individuals", as they say on their website.

This video gives a decent glimpse of not just what traceability looks like for livestock, but more importantly, how the technology behind it is being marketed. One of the RFID tag readers is, not surprisingly for agribusiness marketing, named using a military analogy: "Crossfire". Enjoy! (.mpg, 32 Mb, 3 min 14 s). Beeeeeeoooooooop.

BeefStocker USA has created a spreadsheet to estimate the cost of the RFID tagging component of compliance with NAIS.

But as NoNAIS points out,

Ag Observatory published two somewhat contradictory stories from the newswires on March 15th that both relate to the discovery of the third case of mad cow disase. The first deals with legistlators who are capitalizing on this discovery to make the National Agricultural Identification System (NAIS) for tracing cattle mandatory. Right now it's voluntary, and as this article states,

About 10 percent of the 2 million premises nationwide have been registered.

They fail to mention, however, that these are mostly the largest feedlots and slaughterhouses.

Meanwhile, the other article outlines the USDA's plans to reduce the amount of testing of cattle at the time of slaughter.

To what degree are food security and profit, the two goals of animal identification, amenable? The USDA just released their implementation plan (PDF) for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a "a cooperative State-Federal-industry partnership to standardize and expand animal identification programs and practices to all livestock species and poultry", and USDA secretary Mike Johanns just held a press conference about it. Straight from the horse's mouth...:

As many are aware, [NAIS] will also help the U.S. livestock industry to remain competitive. Traceability is being used as a marketing tool by several countries. For example, Australia is aggressively marketing animal traceability to gain a competitive advantage over us. We know how important the export market is to livestock producers, and we want to retain our competitiveness in the international arena.

BTW, don't you love use of cowboy graphics to market this stuff?

One of the premises of this site is that the development and enforcement of grades and standards in agriculture are increasingly important nodes of power in the neoliberal economy. Which makes a story like this one, about government certifiers refusing to cross the picket line at the UFCW strike of the Tyson-owned Lakeside Packers meatpacking plant in Brooks, Alberta, all the more exciting.Here#039s the story. (Tuesday October 25, CBC).

The strike is now over, after 55% of workers voted to accept a contract. Check out the UFCW.ca page about the strike.

There's a new report by Devlin Kuyek and GRAIN about the bird flu crisis. For all you executives, here's the Executive Summary:

Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.