Stop the National Animal Identification System (NAIS)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is busy implementing the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a corporate welfare program for Agribusiness and surveillance technology companies. NAIS will drive family farms out of business, raise the price of your food, and increase red tape in nightmarish proportions.

NAIS will force owners of farm animals, even non-farmers who keep them as pets, to obtain a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) number for each animal they own. Every time an animal moves beyond the premises it is normally kept, its owner will have to file a report. If a pet goat crosses the street, a report would have to be filed.

Even though the government misleadingly labels the program "voluntary" the Agriculture Secretary suggests it will become mandatory if animal owners don't, "volunteer."

This is very bad for animal lovers and hobbyists, and even worse for farmers trying to make a living. The cost of RFID tags will range from $3 to $20 for each animal. There are many other costs and registration fees associated with the program, and potentially heavy fines for incorrect reporting.

These costs will destroy the already small profit margins of many farmers, driving them out of business. But these rules won't apply to corporate-owned factory farms! They will need just one Group/Lot ID number to account for scores, even thousands of animals.

NAIS will make it easier for Big Agribusinesses to export beef and other products. And it will bring huge profits to corporations that develop surveillance technologies. But domestically speaking, the economic cost of NAIS will be $15 billion a year, reflected in higher food prices.

NAIS addresses a "problem" of animal disease control that current laws and agencies already cover, and its remedy is to punish innocent family farms. Factory farms are at greater risk of disease outbreaks than are smaller farms, and most contamination occurs at the slaughterhouse or later in the process. To make matters worse, through computer hacking and counterfeit RFID tags, NAIS actually makes our food supply more vulnerable to terrorists and other criminals.

We're only scratching the surface. See our Background page for more about NAIS. And please use our form below to tell Congress to stop the Department of Agriculture from implementing NAIS.

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