You evidently have NOT read ANY of the views of small livestock operators as to their problems with NAIS. It will NOT stop disease, it will NOT make your food safer, it actually will NOT do most all the things that we are being told it will do. It WILL cost a LOT of $$, it will put most small farmers out of business and it WILL assure that YOU get to eat meat products that are highly questionable. England and Australia both have similar programs and BOT programs are a shambles. Millions of head of livestock cannot be located, records are lost and misfiled, tracking is often impossible (save for the “old fashioned” paper trails that are still being used and have been used for MANY decades). I also doubt that you would enter into a contract with the government that states you are now a “shareholder” of a “premise” (legally defining you as an operator of a “property”/premise who’s ownership has not yet been decided). You also sign up allowing governmental inspection at any time without notification. This also becomes an un recorded lien on your “premise”. This is all necessary to get into the NAIS program to receive a PIN. There is much more involved here but I hope you get the drift of MY feelings. Do some research!

I share your concerns about the safety of our meat products. I too would like to see better regulation of this industry. But I want to see it done in such a way that differentiates between the average CAFO and the average small beef farm. I would like to see fruit and vegetable produce safety improved as well. But to ask a farmer with a few acres of mixed produce to jump through costly and difficult hoops just to sell a head of lettuce or a pumkin at a farmer’s market is absurd.

What we have to understand here is that the food borne illnesses are often not starting at the farm, but at the feed lot or the processing plant where food products from many different suppliers are being sorted, packaged, mixed, repackaged and shipped out around the country with no way of knowing where it originated from. Tracking the cow to the slaughterhouse is one thing, but how is NAIS going to help us when that cow is mixed with hundreds of other cows to make ground beef that is then sent to supermarkets and sold under the supermaket brand name? It’s like trying to put a tag on water from one creek and tracking that same water as it flows down to meet larger streams, which run into rivers, which pour into lakes and oceans. There has to be a better way. For starters, invite small farmers to the table in Washington instead of just listening to the concerns of corporate agribusinessmen.