Nebraska's cows kept identified
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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Ask Dennis Hughes why Nebraska needs to give its livestock operations identification numbers, and he immediately mounts his soapbox.
Nebraska’s state veterinarian points to 2001 and to an outbreak of swine pseudorabies. A highly contagious calamity struck the pork industry four years after the state thought it had the disease under control.
“There was a major outbreak in northeast Nebraska that took us 10 months to clean up,” said Hughes, who was a field veterinarian for the state Department of Agriculture at the time.
Had the state had a system commonly described as premise ID in place, it would have been much easier to monitor livestock movements, and to track down and contain the problem.
Hughes’ personal experience with a more hit-and-miss approach helps explain why Nebraska now leads the nation in voluntary registration of the thousands of places where livestock are regularly present.
As of late October, more than 13,000 of an estimated 31,000 known locations have been logged and assigned a number.
“We are lucky or fortunate here,” he said. “We have not run into any real solidified resistance against us.”
Premise ID began in Nebraska in September 2004 as the first step toward a National Animal Identification System that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns would like to see in place by 2009.
In the age of mad-cow disease, meat recalls and anxious overseas customers, the goal is to rein in the potential for serious disease outbreaks, including those that might be launched by acts of terrorism.
The national directive calls for voluntary participation, although Indiana and Wisconsin are examples of states that exercised their option to make premise identification mandatory.
While Nebraska is a model of progress with voluntary participation, neighboring Missouri is not. Missouri is an example of mounting federal worries about sign-ups moving too slowly.
Steve Goff, a state veterinarian and head of Missouri’s animal identification program, said the Show Me State may have as many as 104,000 locations to log, and the numbers get higher if you count horses.
So far, only about 10,200 identification numbers have been assigned. Much of the reason, according to Goff: “We may have the most well-organized opposition group.”
“They’re into rights and/or violation of rights,” he said. “This development violates too many of their rights — privacy, property, constitutional. I had one letter from an individual who wrote that it violated his natural rights, whatever that is.”
Some of the misinformation has gotten a bit wild, he said. An example of what’s being passed around, he said: “Whenever you ride (a horse) over to your neighbor’s house, you’re going to have to file a report. And people really believe that.”
“In our state,” said Goff, “we’ve got a lot of people who don’t want the government in their business more than it already is.”
Nebraskans are certainly similar, but Pete McClymont, a third-generation Holdrege cattle feeder and president of the Nebraska Cattlemen, said the state’s largest livestock organization is urging its members to cooperate.
“Animal safety and so forth, it’s paramount to making sure that herds are safe,” McClymont said, “and that we can track them in case of disease surveillance. From that standpoint, those are positive things that we need to look at as we move forward.”
That’s not to say he and his leadership peers are oblivious to concerns with the program or to the need to speak about them.
Among those concerns is liability for unforeseeable health problems.
“If there’s something wrong with an animal, and due to the animal ID system, it’s traced back to an individual producer, that’s an issue.
“Another issue would be that people who want animal ID feel it should be used for disease surveillance only, that it not be used by the IRS to make sure that you only have X-amount of cows.”
Christin Kamm, speaking for the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, said that isn’t going to happen.
“It’s completely confidential by Nebraska law.”
But others say the restrictions of the present don’t dictate everything that can happen later.
At the Nebraska Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons, John Crabtree thinks beef and pork producers should be careful in being herded beyond premise ID into a system that accounts for individual animals.
One reason is that the possibility the system will be privatized, at some point, can’t be ruled out.
As far as Crabtree is concerned, it’s unclear where federal agriculture officials are headed on that issue.
“They were pretty clear on the fact that they wanted to privatize it,” he said. “Subsequently, they drew back from that a little bit.”
If too much information about what’s happening in meat production gets into the wrong hands, it could result in market manipulation, he warned.
If this identification chore is worth doing, “then it’s worth doing publicly and not privatizing the system,” Crabtree said. “Because that’s just too much of an invitation to a system that’s corrupt and that victimizes producers, especially small and medium-sized farmers.”
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net
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