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?

The computer scientist who wrote Minix, which was the inspiration for Linux, has just shown that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are vulnerable to viruses and worms. In a laboratory setting, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, infected RFID tags with a computer worm, capable of transmitting itself to other tags.

As an article at New Scientist states,

A tag infected with a worm and attached, for example, to a piece of luggage could rapidly infect other luggage in an airport, the Dutch researchers say. "On arrival at other airports, these cases will be scanned again and within 24 hours, hundreds of airports throughout the world could be infected.

Someone recently posted about RFID tags on food on the hugely popular "news for nerds" website Slashdot:

Angry_Admin writes "According to the article at IT World Canada, Recent food security scares have triggered public outcries and intense concern. People want to know exactly what is in their food, and what is done to it by whom. In response, Canada and many other countries are introducing traceability requirements - records that track all links in the food supply chain, from farmers to processors to retailers to consumers. The Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada agency recently released a policy framework, stating the goal is to make 80 per cent of all food products traceable by 2008."

Of course, you only read Slashdot for the hundreds of witty comments by hackers, such one guy who predicts this will prompt questions like: "Why is my Big Mac linking back to a horse farm??". Unfortunately, most of the tech geek comments are very optimistic about RFID, partially because many realize that RFID will be creating an increasingly

Here's an example of micro traceability technology being used by a progressive business.

When you buy a carton of organic soy milk from Organic Valley, you can enter the date of expiration on the their website, and find out who grew the soybeans that your milk was made from.

While i really like this idea, i can't help but feel a bit unsure about whether or not this is the kind of transparency that we should be looking for. I'm all for transparency, meeting the farmers etc., but doesn't this also contribute to fetishizing the commodity? If i'm going to fetishize something, i'd rather it be the very progressive and successful institution that allowed a farmer to cooperate with other farmers, act as good stewards of the land, and succeed.

On a related note:

In a great article in The New York Times it was reported that when Wal-Mart demanded they reduce their prices by 20%, Organic Valley balked, and walked away from what is probably their biggest customer.

So claims a poultry extension agent at Purdue, who cites the dangers of cockfighting,"multiple species", and Asians who "sleep closely" with their fowl as reasons why the American vertically integrated, closed-off industrial system is safer.

B.S., says Mike Davis, who recently on Democracy Now argued that the threat of Avian Flu is greatly increased by both the power of industrial poultry agribusiness and the new ecology of industrial poultry farming. What we have seen, he says, is the

"generalization around the world of the American model of poultry production, the Tyson model. Tyson is the giant poultry producer, one of the most exploitative corporations in the United States with just an appalling record of working conditions. Tyson kills several billion chickens a year. It's created huge conurbations of chickens, unprecedented concentrations of chickens.

Now this model has spread to East Asia. China has become the biggest consumer of poultry in the world, and the leading company involved in China is a Thai-based firm called C.P., which has used the Tyson model, a vertical integration of concentrating poultry in enormous warehouses. And it was directly involved in the Thai government's cover-up of the initial outbreak of avian flu in Thailand last year. The industrialization of poultry, above all, has sped up the evolution of influenza. It's changed the nature of disease by changing its ecology."

I would expect that the primary means for grain handling facilities such as the Pacific Gateway Terminal at the port of Vancouver to distinguish themselves would be their ability to handle enormous boats and tens of thousands of train cars. But this announcement, sent out by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool in response to an investigation by the Commissioner of Competition, implies that the increasingly important role of other factors.

"Pacific Gateway Terminals is providing cost-competitive service to customers while adding value in much-needed areas of identity preservation, product traceability, food safety, and railcar and vessel logistics," said Malecha.

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.