Sigh.  It’s not starting off to be a good year, legislatively, for small farms, for organic farms, for people who eat food locally grown, sustainably grown, thoughtfully grown.

Yesterday it was HR 875, the bill that will make it functionally impossible to grow food sensibly and in effect make only the lowest common denominators of food products available, the kind mass produced by Big Ag in our stores.  Urban farmer’s markets selling local produce will become economically untenable, and they’ll wither and disappear or turn into craft fairs.

Today it is HR 814, the bill that will make NAIS mandatory.  HR 814: TRACE Act of 2009, “Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009″.  This bill requires, for the “safety” of our food supply, that every farm animal on every farm, large and small, be registered so that it can be traced from birth to death. As if that will make us all safer.

What’s wrong with our food supply is that certain large corporations value profits over consumer safety, and value revenue over responsibility.  They find creative ways to cut costs by poisoning the soil (and everything that grows in it) in the name of cleanliness and safety.  They pack their animals into tiny concentration camps where they defecate all over each other

HR 814 doesn’t specify how to trace the animals. That’s left to the regulators to decide within a year of the bill’s passage.  One year?  That means the only choice is to make mandatory the government’s only animal tracing program, the NAIS run by the USDA.  NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, an Orwellian Big Brother surveillance program for animals.  Ostensibly voluntary, the USDA puts pressure on state agencies to get their local farms to sign up and participate.  The state agencies cheat on this by using existing farm records to sign up farmers without their permission, or by calling farmers with surveys and using these results to sign them up, or by refusing state benefits or programs to farmers if they don’t sign up.

What’s wrong with NAIS?  That’s not the question.  What’s right about it?  There is no research that says the many millions spent on it will be able to stop any disease outbreaks or help anyone deal with the situation.  It is designed by Big Ag to benefit Big Ag and to penalize small farmers.  For example, if your company grows hundreds of beef cattle at a time and ships them all in one batch from feedlot to slaughter, then you need exactly one tag, one registration for all these animals.  But if you’re a small farmer with 60 sheep, trying to raise lambs for local sale, you have to register and track from birth to death every individual animal, every ewe and every lamb.  Sixty times the paperwork of a whole feedlot of cows.  Sell one lamb?  File the paperwork.  Keep the records.  Allow a government inspector to make copies of any piece of paper and any disk drive that might have information related to any of your animals.  Trust them with your privacy.

Sigh.  I’m not really the one to write this… not yet.  I don’t know enough about it, haven’t experienced it firsthand.  Go read the accounts of people who’ve already been affected by it at NoNAIS.org.  Find out why several states have banned the NAIS, who have taken a stand against this onerous burden on small farmers… with no increase in food safety, only costs.  Find out that federal legislation such as this could run roughshod over the states, forcing their farmers to comply despite the state statutes.

And then wonder why the supermarkets have more and more of less and less that you want to take home to cook and eat.  And think of us while you eat it.