From the Liberty Ark Coalition —

As part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ongoing pattern of dishonest tactics, the USDA and industry organizations are backing away from an internal Agriculture Department memo that outlines how to force farm registration into the USDA’s National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The Agriculture Department memo, issued on Sept. 22, dictates the procedure by which state agencies shall register farms, despite the owners objections, especially if the owners refuse to voluntarily register.

“The memo not only calls for mandatory registrations, but also seeks to brand individuals as ‘dissenters’,” said Col. (Ret.) Randy Givens, a founder of the Liberty Ark Coalition, an alliance formed to fight the animal identification program.  “The USDA’s document states that people who refuse to ‘voluntarily’ register their property will not only be involuntarily assigned a registration number, but will also be assigned a special code that designates their refusal to ‘volunteer’,” he said.

Under the National Animal Identification System, “premises registrations” are gathered into a massive national database. Individual animals must each be tagged, using mostly microchip devices, and animal owners, even those with just pets, will have to report to the government when they buy or sell animals, when animals die, or when they take an animal off their property for events such as trail rides or shows. Most independent farmers and pet owners of livestock or horses have objected to the extensive costs and the system’s extreme governmental intrusion. Industrial agriculture operations, however, favor it.  These operations will be able to avoid individual tagging by using group identification, saving huge amounts of money that regular farmers and animal owners will have to pay in tagging fees. What’s more, the NAIS promises to cut down their competition because it will drive smaller livestock operations out of business by its costs and onerous nature.

The USDA’s 2005 plan for the animal identification program called for it to become mandatory by 2009. However, in response to widespread protests by animal owners, the agriculture department announced in 2007 that the program would be “voluntary at the federal level.” That change in strategy moved implementation of the mandatory National Animal Identification System down to the states, allowing the agriculture department to disclaim responsibility. Since then, many states have been using federal guidelines and funding, under cooperative agreements, to implement mandatory or coercive National Animal Identification System programs.

Given the USDA’s past deceitful actions promoting their animal identification program despite objections, the memo was an unwelcome, but not surprising, development to animal owners and activists. “It’s been clear for some time that USDA planned to use existing disease programs to register citizens’ property,” said Karin Bergener, a horse owner and steering committee member of the Liberty Art Coalition. “At an industry conference last year, several state agriculture officials discussed their plans to force premises registrations and convert the state’s livestock owners to NAIS-compliant microchip tags. The September USDA memo just puts this plan into writing,” Bergener said.

After two groups, the Liberty Art Coalition and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA), made the memo public on Nov. 1, concerned animal owners promptly started calling their state departments of agriculture to inquire what it meant. In response, the agriculture department and pro-NAIS industry organizations such as the American Horse Council have launched a campaign to re-cast the memo.

“This is the usual response; they are denying the plain meaning of the memo,” said Judith McGeary, executive director of Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance and small farmer. “In a recent letter, the American Horse Council declared that anti-NAIS activists did not understand the memo and that the memo was discussing plans for some unspecified time in the future,” McGeary said. “But the memo was issued by the agency, written in the present tense, with no caveats or limitations.”

Some agriculture department regional officials have stated that they haven’t even read the memo. Some state agriculture officials have said they do not plan to enforce it, while one state agency has said it will be enforced only for programs paid for by the USDA. McGeary questions, “What would they have done if activists hadn’t publicized the memo? The agencies pattern is to push NAIS behind closed doors, and to try to discredit any opposition by disclaiming the agencies’ own written plans once revealed. The agencies and businesses that will profit from NAIS are determined to push the program through by whatever means they can find. It’s past time for Congress and state legislatures to rein in these rogue agencies,” McGeary said.

If you weren’t able to make it to the Tennessee Farmers and Freeholders meeting last night in Franklin, you really missed out.

Not only did Frank Niceley give a fascinating speech telling the news of a very hopeful year for small farm legislation in Tennessee, but also there were a bunch of dedicated people there—farmers, their customers, and folks aspiring to be both.

By now you all know that Democrats hold sway in Washington. The opposite is true in Tennessee. The Republicans now hold the majority in both the House and Senate. Please do not stop here and mistake this bit of info for an endorsement of the Republican Party. I mean it simply to point out that Republicans have and generally will favour legislation for small farmers. What benefits small farmers, of course, benefits their customers and the local economies we live in.

A perfect case in point was the position of several farmers at the meeting last night who sell pastured poultry. Even though the USDA grants them a 20,000 bird exemption from Federal Regulations, the State of Tennessee ignores that exemption and makes them drive to Bowling Green, Kentucky to have their birds processed. As you can imagine, this costs quite a bit for the farmers, who are then forced to raise their price for birds. This needless practice (notice I did not say legislation—this is not the result of legislation, but a practice by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture) hurts farmers and their customers.

As farmers and friends of farmers we understand the trust required for us to work together. A farmer, by selling directly to you, his customer, is directly accountable to you, personally, and is therefore driven to make sure you receive (please note this carefully) food better than what he eats. If you get a chicken from him, you’re not getting the ones with the broken wings and torn skin. Those less than perfect items are what he and his family eat.

Therefore, as you can see, if a farmer, directly responsible to you, can process birds himself and sell them off his farm, his costs drop dramatically, and, logically, so would the price he has to charge you.

At stake is more than farmers and consumers. The fallacy of depending on a national economy at the expense of local economies is being made plain in the current economic crisis. We must rebuild thriving, sustainable, local economies, not only for farmers and consumers, but for all Tennesseans. The only sure
foundation for this rebuilding is to revitalize local agriculture. All the rest of the economy is built on agriculture, so if agriculture withers, the local economy shrivels up and dies.

The poultry case above is just a small example of how Tennessee Farmers & Freeholders can work to help all of us.

But it can’t be done by one or two people. We still need your help.

• We need help researching and drafting legislation.
• We need help monitoring legislation.
• We need you to not just call your representatives, but, please, please, come to the legislative offices when there are hearings. Believe it or not, your simple attendance can work wonders.

Please join us in this fight, and encourage your friends to stop by farmersandfreeholders.org. Everyone needs to sign up for email updates (see the top right of this page) to make sure we have the means to contact you when necessary.

Finally, please join and support Tennessee Farmers and Freeholders if you haven’t already by downloading and completing a membership application and mailing it to the address on the form.

What in the world is a “freeholder”? And what in the world is Tennessee Farmers & Freeholders?

A freeholder is any farmer or other Tennessean who owns and runs his own place. Tennessee Farmers & Freeholders is an organization formed to give a voice to the invisible: Tennessee’s farmers, small businessmen and consumers are often crushed by misguided government policies that favour big business and big agriculture. TF&F aims to fight for consumers who want full and free access to wholesome, locally grown produce, raw milk, and healthy meat and poultry by changing the silly government regulations that stand in their way.

Who should come to the TF&F meeting? Any consumer who wants wholesome, local produce, meat, and milk, and healthy, sustainable local economies.

What will we talk about? How we can change government law, regulation, and policy to remove roadblocks in the way of local farmers and freeholders. This will include initiatives for the next legislative session that you need to support.

Who will talk? Tennessee state representative Frank Niceley, who has led the fight in the legislature against the tyrannical National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and for wholesome, healthy, locally grown and grass fed raw milk.

Join us Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 7:00pm in the Conference Room of the Best Western at I-65 and Hwy 96 (near Franklin).