By NANCY VORIS
Indiana Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Livestock marketers are skeptical about current discussions on the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), concerned the plan will not maintain the “speed of commerce” necessary in livestock marketing.

The Livestock Marketing Assoc. (LMA) policy is that NAIS should remain voluntary. That was the message of LMA Vice President for Government and Industry Affairs Nancy Robinson at an April 15 discussion called by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

For markets, Robinson, said, “speed of commerce” means processing and marketing cattle on sale day within just a few hours, minimizing weight shrinkage, protecting the safety and welfare of market employees and the livestock they handle and moving animals on to their next destination with a minimum of delay.

Maintaining this speed, she said, “is the key to assuring that everyone in the production, marketing and processing chain continues to profit and thrive.” It must also be USDA’s “principal benchmark” in decision-making on the development and implementation of any animal ID program.

A mandatory NAIS would require several more hours for tagging and computer recording. Instead of livestock arriving the morning of the sale and leaving the same day it would require consignments arrive a day early, creating an increase in yardage and handling fees. Stressed animals lose weight and health value.

“It would be a big mess,” said Stan Gildersleeve of Indianapolis Stockyards, Inc. “It would put the little operations out of business and would be too much paperwork.”

LMA Information Director John McBride said, “What it is going to do is make our people the policemen for NAIS, and of course, they don’t want to be that.”

Robinson identified other LMA member concerns with the NAIS plan. Low-frequency RFID tag and tag reader technology has been shown to be inadequate in preserving the speed of commerce in most market settings. There is also no clear evidence that high-frequency RFID is a better solution.

USDA must identify a standardized ID technology that’s compatible from one livestock operation to another, before moving to a mandatory NAIS. The agency’s current “technology neutral” position will result in many incompatible, imperfect ID technologies and systems, bringing “enormous inefficiencies and cost” to the industry, stated the LMA.

A mandated ID program will likely require many markets to establish tagging services for their consignors who are unable to tag their animals on-farm. That will lead to many other concerns for the markets, including added costs to the market, worker safety, liability and animal welfare.

The current NAIS plan does not indicate how USDA will pay for putting the plan into operation. That will lead to more resistance to the program.

The cattle ID systems in Australia and Canada should not be used to justify a similar U.S. ID program. The U.S. cattle industry is also not comparable, in several key areas, to the nation’s swine, sheep and dairy industries – and any mandatory ID program should reflect those differences.

It is time, Robinson said, to quit “muddying the NAIS waters” with talk of value-added, trade, food safety and (country of origin labeling) benefits and hone in on what this effort “is really about … animal disease control and eradication.”

An ID program too expensive or difficult to comply or bother with “is certain to put any number of small producers out of business, and further contract the industry.”

That contraction and consolidation, as a consequence of a government-mandated NAIS program “would be disastrous for rural America,” according to the LMA.

If the USDA is committed to a mandatory ID program, starting with the so-called “bookend” ID and tracking system would give the industry time to adapt. It would also allow advanced ID technologies time to “catch up with the realities of the U.S. livestock industry.”

The bookend system does not track movement by movement. Instead, it requires all livestock to be identified to their premises of origin, so that diseased animals can be more quickly traced by starting at the farm of origin, and back from the point at which the disease was detected.

LMA appreciates Vilsack’s understanding that the best policy for establishing “a complex, multifaceted national animal ID program, befitting the size and scope of the U.S. livestock industry,” is to proceed in a “deliberatively measured way.”

Congress has made it clear to Vilsack that unless they see movement on NAIS, they will no longer fund the program. Vilsack said his goal is to prevent a system that “people resist, people resent and that people figure out ways to get around it.” More public hearings are planned.