His studies concentrate on the extraction and analysis of fat tissue in the cows.
(The Daily Evergreen, WA)
By Jessica Dolan
For 25 years John McNamara, scientist and professor of animal sciences, has studied dairy cattle lactation, nutrition and reproduction at WSU. The goal of his studies is to identify the most genetically efficient animals, he said. An animal is more efficient when it can make more food with fewer resources.
“Lactation is important to study because it plays a key role in mammalian reproduction as well as plays a major role in the production of food products for human consumption,” Jennifer Sumner said. Sumner has worked with McNamara for four years researching the topic as his doctoral student and postdoctoral research associate.
They want the animals to be healthy and to produce milk in the most efficient way, McNamara said. When looking at the milk they are not looking at the quality of the milk, but the quantity.
“In 1960, a good dairy cow would produce 5,000 pounds of milk in a year,” he said. “Now a good dairy cow will produce 2,500 pounds of milk in a year.” Dairy cattle have one calf a year, which means they lactate for nine months. Normal dairy cattle have a calf every 12 to 13 months, McNamara said. If a cow was to take longer in this process then it is not as efficient.
McNamara’s and Sumner’s research focuses on the cattle’s adipose tissue, also known as fat tissue. This tissue is connected to the efficiency of the animal. It was extracted and analyzed.
Before extracting the fat samples, the cows were given anesthesia in order to minimize their discomfort. The process consisted of taking two samples. One sample was taken a month before the cow gave birth to her calf and another was taken a month after to get a better idea of what genes increase or decrease during lactation.
The genes found in the fat tissue were perilipin, hormone sensitive lipase and the beta-adrenergic receptors, Sumner said. These genes are the key in the release of lipids from the fat tissue to meet the needs of the animal for milk production and other functions. All of the genes increased during lactation, McNamara said.
“We did measure milk production at the same time to look at the relationship between milk production and how much body fat is mobilized or used to support it,” Sumner said.
The next step is to figure out why the genes went up and also which animals express this factor the most. The process is estimated to take about three years to complete, McNamara said.
Milk is the largest single source of calcium in the world, and humans need 15 to 20 percent in their diets, McNamara said. The information learned from the dairy cattle can also be applied to human health and breast feeding.
In order to continue research, another grant needs to be approved. However, research is always being done and several people are working on this around the country, McNamara said.
“This study is not looking for a final answer, it is looking for a constant improvement,” he said. 12-03-07
(Associated Press)
Frank Teunissen helped California became the nation's leading dairy state before he left his family's ranch outside Los Angeles and bought his own 600-acre spread in Idaho. Now, he is part of a growing trend in which ranchers throughout the West are using those same methods to challenge California's dominance of the U.S. dairy market.
''Idaho and New Mexico are looking at California and saying we can do that, too,'' said Leslie Butler, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis.
U.S. Department of Agriculture figures show California produced 3.3 billion gallons of milk in 2006 -- a 17 percent increase from five years earlier, but a growth rate that lags several competing states.
During that same period, Idaho increased production by 40 percent to 937.4 million gallons, while New Mexico posted a 37 percent jump to 653.6 million gallons. Arizona pumped up output 28 percent to 344 million gallons, and Colorado saw a 29 percent jump to 215 million gallons.
''California is still the largest, but the question is, Are they going to be able to maintain growth?'' Purdue University agricultural economist Joseph Balagtas said.
Ranchers in Idaho, New Mexico and other states are copying many of the same high-yield dairy methods that fueled rapid expansion in California in the mid-1990s.
The strategy, which Butler calls ''the California model,'' includes taking cows off pastures -- where they graze in thinly spread herds -- and concentrating them together in massive dairies. Feed is shipped into operations and manure is hauled out, rather than relying on naturally occurring processes in pastures.
Teunissen said his bottom line in Idaho has also benefited from cheaper feed and from utilities that cost one-third as much as his family paid in California. ''It was a great opportunity for my wife and I,'' he said about his move.
Cheap land, lower taxes and less stringent regulations have also aided the production push in other states, said Gary Genske, a dairy industry consultant. In addition, dairy ranchers outside California don't face the state's strict air and water quality regulations.
California, the nation's leading agricultural state, has a lot riding on its dairy industry. Milk and cream were the state's top agricultural commodities in 2006, raking in $5.22 billion of the $32 billion in total sales generated by the industry, according to the state Food and Agriculture Department.
But since 2004, when California ranchers lost their exemptions to federal air quality regulations, they have had to make costly adjustments to curtail emissions. Among other things, they must cover roads on their farms with asphalt to keep down dust and build structures to enclose waste lagoons, said Michael Marsh, chief executive of the Western United Dairymen trade group.
Many California ranchers also must turn to expensive consultants and lawyers to see them through the state's lengthy, complex permitting procedures. Depending on the size of a ranch and its location, permit-related fees in California can reach up to $700,000, with the process taking as long as five years, Marsh said.
In Idaho, permit fees can cost as little as $15,000, with the process taking just 90 days, said Bob Naerebout, director of the group United Dairymen of Idaho.
Even though more milk is being produced throughout the West, the increased supply has yet to translate into lower prices for consumers.
Much of the milk and other products are being siphoned off by emerging industrial powers such as India and China, where consumers have more money to spend on healthy diets, Butler said.
Butler said it's only natural for milk production to migrate from California to states where it can be done more cheaply and efficiently.
New York and Wisconsin took their turns as the nation's dominant milk state before California, he noted.
''I have no doubt that other states that are expanding will continue to expand, and that simply becomes a competitive element that dairy producers have to face,'' Butler said. 12-07-07
(Associated Press)
Mike Schouten has watched the dairy industry grow in the Panhandle -- and helped it along.
Schouten moved his dairy operation to the region five years ago from near Stephenville in central Texas, one of dozens who have done so since 2001.
The region is attracting dairies from within and outside Texas. Land in the wide-open Panhandle is cheaper and the climate is ideal -- low humidity and less rainfall -- which aids swift evaporation and limits runoff into the few streams running through the region.
There's also a reliable water source, the Ogallala Aquifer, which lies deep underground. And feed for the cows can be grown on the dairies or by nearby farmers.
''You don't have the heat stress in the summertime and the wintertimes are similar to central Texas with the exception of more wind,'' said Schouten, who has a herd of nearly 4,000 cows. And there is ''the ability to grow my business in an area that understands agriculture.''
The cow population in the Panhandle has ballooned in the past six years from about 20,000 to 140,000, and the number of dairies has more than tripled to about 70. And more cows are on the way: Officials predict the region's dairy herd will increase by 20,000 annually for the next five years.
The dairies have created jobs -- one new job is added for every 100 cows -- and improved the economies in numerous small towns, some of which courted the industry aggressively to help sustain their viability.
Panhandle dairies now produce more than 40 percent of Texas' milk, up from about 10 percent in 2000, said Ellen Jordan, a dairy specialist with the Texas Cooperative Extension. Of the state's top five milk producing counties, three -- Parmer, Deaf Smith and Castro -- are in the Panhandle.
''The cows don't have to expend any energy to just stay cool or warm,'' Jordan said. ''Consequently, they can be more efficient. That has piqued the interest of a lot of people.''
Texas' dairy industry historically operated mostly in verdant eastern Texas and in Erath and Bosque counties west of Waco. Wet conditions and higher normal rainfall created an environmental impact from manure and runoff into nearby rivers, which created problems for dairy farmers there.
Environmentalists are not enamored with dairies and they remain wary of the operations moving to the Panhandle, even if they do seem to pose a lesser pollution threat. Despite the drier climate, they point out there's still plenty of wind.
''Now, not only are you going to breath sand, you're going to be breathing dried cow dung,'' said Jerome Collins, a spokesman for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.
With about 660 dairies, Texas is the nation's eighth-leading milk production state and is expected to surpass neighboring New Mexico this year. California remains the top U.S. milk producer.
''They are coming from a wide area of the country and find the people in the Panhandle ag friendly,'' Jordan said of dairies relocating to the region from New Mexico, Arizona, California and New York.
''We've grown dairies by leaps and bounds the past few years, and I would expect that to continue for the next few years,'' said Jeff Ammons, a Texas Farm Bureau field representative for 12 counties in the western Panhandle.
Lower transportation costs are another reason for the growth. Milk producers in the region have four plants in western Texas and eastern New Mexico to choose from, including the Hilmar Cheese Co. factory in Dalhart, which opened in October.
Cheese plants took notice as more dairies started springing up in the Panhandle. Since 2000, many municipalities and counties in the Panhandle and southern Plains aggressively recruited dairy operators and related industries.
Many offered incentives, which have paid off.
''You see the changes in the towns,'' said Jordan, who pointed to new stores, restaurants and hotels in Hereford, with about 14,500 people, as an example. 12-10-07
(New York Times)
By ANDREW MARTIN
I’VE been feeling pretty smug lately about zipping over to the farmers’ market or the local Whole Foods for some New York apples or New Jersey spinach and ferrying it home in my reusable grocery bags.
Take that, petrochemical cabal!
I’m not the only one feeling so righteous. Unless you have been stuck in the processed-food aisles of your local grocery store for the last couple of years, you have probably noticed that local food is all the rage.
Union Square in Manhattan may offer one of the most popular farmers’ markets, but Des Moines isn’t far behind, and top restaurants and college campuses are now demanding local food on the plate.
Books and magazines about local food are selling big, too.
Barbara Kingsolver ate locally produced food on her Virginia farm and wrote a best-selling book about it. So did Michael Pollan, who bagged a wild pig and grubbed for mushrooms in Northern California in a quest for the perfect meal (and readers).
And then there was the Brooklyn guy who turned his entire backyard into a miniature farm complete with corn stalks and a chicken coop, and wrote about it in New York magazine. Slaughtered chickens and fresh eggs in Flatbush? How cool is that?
The local food, or locavore, movement has so much momentum that some of the food glitterati have declared that such food is better than organic.
But now comes a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis, who have started asking provocative questions about the carbon footprint of food. Those questions threaten to undermine some of the feel-good locavore story line, not to mention my weekend forays for produce. (A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact of human activities on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced.)
While the research is not yet complete, Tom Tomich, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, said the fact that something is local doesn’t necessarily mean that it is better, environmentally speaking.
The distance that food travels from farm to plate is certainly important, he says, but so is how food is packaged, how it is grown, how it is processed and how it is transported to market.
Consider strawberries. If mass producers of strawberries ship their product to Chicago by truck, the fuel cost of transporting each carton of strawberries is relatively small, since it is tucked into the back along with thousands of others.
But if a farmer sells his strawberries at local farmers’ markets in California, he ferries a much smaller amount by pickup truck to each individual market. Which one is better for the environment?
Mr. Tomich said a strawberry distributor did the math on the back of an envelope and concluded that the Chicago-bound berries used less energy for transport. Maybe. Regardless, the story raises valid questions.
An Iowa State University study in 2003 found that most produce travels about 1,500 miles before it arrives in Iowa homes. But as the strawberry story suggests, some of it creates higher amounts of greenhouse gases than others. Transporting food by container ship or rail is relatively energy efficient. Shipping it by air or a 25-year-old pickup is not.
It gets stickier. If a low-carbon diet is your goal, Mr. Tomich suggests, it may be more effective to change your diet than to focus on eating local. After all, a plant-based diet tends to have a much smaller carbon footprint than a diet that includes meat. That is because a pound of steak requires many more pounds of grain as feed — and all the carbon emissions associated with that, from fertilizers that are derived from fossil fuels to the fuel for the combines used for the harvest, he said.
And if you insist on eating meat, as I do, then perhaps it’s better for the environment to eat poultry rather than red meat and grass-fed rather than grain-fed. Mr. Tomich’s team is trying to sort that out.
Here are a couple of other puzzlers: Are canned tomatoes a better environmental choice in the winter than fresh tomatoes from abroad? If a product that contains heavy packaging reduces the amount of food waste, is that a better choice than one that is lightly packed and spoils quicker?
Gail Feenstra, a food system analyst at the Davis campus, says her group hopes the research will help consumers decide if buying local is better than buying organic food that has traveled hundreds of miles. “Maybe you can buy organic within a certain geographic range, and outside of that the trade-offs won’t work anymore,” Ms. Feenstra said.
At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.
Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.
Here’s why: Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores. I’m no exception. My wife and I shop for groceries at Costco, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, ShopRite, Starbucks, the farmers’ market and the local delicatessen.
“The old idea where our mother goes to the store on Wednesday or Thursday with all the coupons to buy all our groceries has changed,” said Harvey Hartman, who tracks consumer behavior as founder and chief executive of the Hartman Group. “Now we are on our way home from work and we say, ‘Oh, geez, what are we going to have for dinner?’ ”
If all the driving wasn’t producing enough greenhouse gases, Mr. Tomich points out that an even bigger factor may be the amount of food that is tossed out, wasting all the energy that was used to produce and transport it.
Europeans are way ahead of us on this issue. Already, some grocery stores in England offer airplane labels, signifying that a product was shipped by air, or carbon reduction labels, showing that the manufacturer vows to reduce carbon emissions. Both labels will inevitably make their way to American stores.
Certainly, there are many reasons for eating local food — from supporting local farmers to a desire for fresher, potentially tastier food. The research in California, however, offers the prospect of a more nuanced debate on eating a low-carbon diet.
In the meantime, Ms. Feenstra said, the research has already led her to one conclusion: Don’t drive your sport utility vehicle to the farmers’ market, buy one food item and drive home again. Even if you are using reusable bags. 12-09-07
(Associated Press)
Bugs in baby food? Microbes in your milkshake? Relax, this is not the latest tainted food scare -- it's a growing trend in foods designed to boost health, not make you sick. These products contain probiotics, or ''friendly'' bacteria similar to those found in the human digestive system.
There are supplement pills, yogurts, smoothies, snack bars and cereals, even baby formula and chocolate. Sold by major names like Dannon and Kraft, they're spreading like germs on grocery store shelves and in supermarket dairy cases. And they come with vague health claims of ''regulating your digestive health'' or ''strengthening your body's defenses.''
Experts say probiotics are generally safe, and in some cases might be helpful. More research is needed, and it's a hot new area, reflecting a growing understanding of the role that naturally occurring intestinal bacteria play in health. This week, the National Institutes of Health is hosting a conference where top scientists will discuss recent advances.
In the meantime, the market is ahead of the science. It's all part of a burgeoning effort to capitalize on an obsession with health foods. Probiotics are already popular in Europe, Asia and South America.
And there are ''prebiotics,'' too, which contain fiber and other nutrients that feed probiotic bacteria.
So far this year, more than 150 probiotic and prebiotic commercial food products have been introduced in the U.S., compared with about 100 last year and just 40 in 2005, said Tom Vierhile of Datamonitor, a market research firm. ''It is definitely a growing trend,'' Vierhile said.
Holly Maloney, a nutrition instructor at Chicago's Kendall College, eats new probiotic nutrition bars that claim to help digestion and the immune system. She's also a longtime fan of yogurt and kefir, a probiotic-containing fermented milk drink. ''It just makes me feel good,'' Maloney, 32, said of the products. ''If I have a few days where I don't have it, I don't feel right.''
While many probiotic products haven't been put to a rigorous scientific test, there is emerging evidence that in huge amounts, some kinds of ''friendly'' bacteria can be helpful. Small studies have suggested that certain probiotics might help treat or prevent some types of gastroenteritis, diarrhea and allergic skin reactions, and the bugs are being investigated for many other ailments.
The NIH has declared the study of gastrointestinal bacteria and probiotics a major research initiative. The agency's upcoming meeting will highlight current science so it can identify research gaps and determine the direction of future research, said Crystal McDade-Ngutter, who heads an NIH working group on the topic.
''The fact that there are a number of health implications and a lack of understanding associated with the use of pre- and probiotics makes this a very interesting subject to study,'' she said.
The bugs are being put under the microscope around the globe. For example:
--A Canadian study published last month suggested that fermented milk containing Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus caseii could help prevent antibiotic-related diarrhea.
--A study from Finland published this year found that an oat drink containing Bifidobacterium lactis bacteria helped bowel function in nursing home residents.
--Scientists in Argentina are investigating whether milk fermented with lactic acid bacteria might reduce amounts of cancer-causing substances in the intestine.
--University of California at Los Angeles researchers are looking at whether probiotic supplements can treat allergy-induced skin rashes in babies.
--Israeli scientists are studying whether these supplements can improve complications in liver disease.
Even without all the answers from science, probiotics are a multibillion-dollar global industry. In the United States alone, retail sales of probiotic-containing foods and supplements totaled an estimated at $764 million in 2005 and are projected to reach $1 billion in 2010, according to market research firm BCC Research.
Dannon's Activia yogurt, introduced last year, is among the best known U.S. products. Its first-year U.S. sales totaled more than $100 million. General Mills introduced its competitor, Yo-Plus, under the Yoplait yogurt brand this year. Other 2007 products include: Kraft Foods Inc.'s LiveActive prebiotic cottage cheese and probiotic cheddar cheese; Nestle's probiotic Good Start Natural Cultures baby formula; Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp.'s Good Evening prebiotic baby food; and the Swiss firm Barry Callebaut's probiotic chocolate.
University of Michigan researcher Gary Huffnagle calls probiotics ''a new essential food group'' in his new book, ''The Probiotics Revolution.''
The concept, however, is not new. Yogurt, made from milk fermented by bacteria, dates back centuries and has been said to have cured a 16th century French king's intestinal illness and to explain longevity in rural Bulgaria.
But there's an emerging shift in how scientists view probiotic bacteria and their role in health.
Millions of good bacteria live in the intestinal tract, helping keep bad, illness-causing bacteria at bay. Scientists increasingly believe that illness arises when that balance gets out of whack and bad bugs start to take over.
This overgrowth has been implicated in many common digestive problems including inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome, said Dr. Sri Komanduri, a gastrointestinal specialist at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.
This line of thinking ''has prompted not only the medical industry and obviously the food industry to try to create things to shift the balance back toward that good bacteria,'' he said.
Komanduri prescribes medical-strength probiotic pills containing 450 billion live lactic acid bacteria for inflammatory bowel disease and bacterial overgrowth in the gut. But he doesn't recommend them for patients without specific complaints, and doesn't recommend probiotic foods because he said there's no evidence that they are as effective.
Patients who use them and report benefits are likely experiencing a placebo effect, Komanduri said.
Commercial products containing probiotics fall under Food and Drug Administration regulations. They are not supposed to make drug-like claims about curing or treating specific illnesses, said FDA spokeswoman Kimberly Rawlings. ''As long as they don't cross the line,'' they can come pretty close, she said.
Huffnagle advised consumers to be wary of probiotic-containing products that don't specify how much or what type of bacteria. ''If a company says something is probiotic, the question is, how much, and what kind,'' he said.
Evidence suggests the bugs need to be alive and ingested in huge amounts, generally between 5 billion and 10 billion daily, he said. While some products claim to have more, he said it's uncertain whether more is better. 12-09-07
Artificial insemination grows as industry focuses on safety, production
(Associated Press)
Most of the 400 Holstein cows on B&B Dairy will never see a bull in their lives, but they are bred with some of the most sought-after studs in the world. The same went for their mothers and most of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
It's done through artificial insemination, a growing industry in the U.S. and abroad, which allows farmers to breed good traits like fertility and milk quality into their calves and breed out bad ones. Higher milk prices, heat-inducing drugs, better genes and the opening of more international markets are fueling the growth, according to National Association of Animal Breeders President Gordon Doak.
Matt Schultz, a herdsman at B&B, said the farm has used artificial insemination since 1987. The biggest advantage is not having a temperamental bull around that could kill someone, Schultz said. "In a perfect world it would be pretty weird that these cows wouldn't see a bull, but in the dairy industry now, with the whole safety issue and everything like that, it's much better this way," said Schultz, 28.
The number of units of dairy bull semen sold within the nation has increased more than 39 percent and exports have risen nearly 20 percent from 1995 to 2005. For beef bull semen, domestic sales increased nearly 28 percent and exports rose nearly 15 percent.
Doak said U.S. farmers spent about $225 million last year on bull semen. Exports totaled about $56.4 million, although Doak said they are leveling off as foreign countries produce more bulls with good genetics.
Depending on the farmers' budget — a semen unit generally ranges in price from a couple dollars to $50 — they choose from bulls depending on the traits they produce. Those include fertility, milk production, butter fat production and protein content of milk.
About 95 percent of the dairy bull semen companies own or lease the bulls and collect the semen and market it, said Doak, whose 25-member association is based in Columbia, Mo. The others have bull owners bring the animals to the company's facility, where the semen is collected. The farmer either takes it home or the company stores it and ships it for the owner.
Just as the females' insemination works minus the male, the males' process is generally without a female. The bulls are charmed with a teaser animal — usually a steer — and semen is collected with a radiator-like hose lined in latex so warm water can go between the hose and the lining.
"It's as natural as what would happen to him if he was just running out in a pasture with a cow," Doak said.
Once the semen is extracted, antibiotics and preservatives are added, and the mixture is frozen and stored, Doak said.
Paul VanRaden, a genetic researcher at the Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said an average dairy bull produces 10,000 daughters and 10,000 sons during his lifetime.
There are at least 10 bulls that have produced more than 1 million units of semen and several bulls that make more than $3 million a year, he said.
Having so many offspring increases the chances of inbreeding, but a computer registry keeps track of the cow and bull genetics, VanRaden said.
Evidence shows one of the first uses of artificial insemination dates to the Arabs in the 14th century, when tribes would steal sperm from rival tribes' horses, Doak said. The first official use was in Italian dogs in 1780.
Rutgers University in New Jersey formed the first commercial artificial insemination organization in the U.S. around 1938. Soon, there were about 100 organizations before consolidation left five companies that now do about 95 percent of the collecting and processing of semen, Doak said.
The nation's five biggest customers in 2005 were the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, Canada and Brazil according to the USDA.
Felipe Ruiz, general director for the Mexican Holstein Association in Queretaro, Mexico, said Mexican farmers use artificial insemination for more than 80 percent of their cows and a little less than half of the semen is from the U.S.
The process has improved farmers' herds and milk production, Ruiz said. But he said they've had to import less semen over the last few years because of restrictions on cow imports due to mad cow disease.
The unabashed leader in the trade is Wisconsin, where four of the five main artificial insemination companies in the U.S. are based.
Donna Gilson, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, said Wisconsin's four companies shipped $31 million worth of bull semen internationally in 2005.
John Parrish, an animal science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Wisconsin is so prominent because of the large population of dairy cattle and the cooler summer climate is suitable for production of semen, which goes bad faster in warmer climates.
Back at B & B Dairy, Schultz said the cows seem to know Ken Montsma, the artificial insemination technician for Accelerated Genetics, one of the insemination companies.
"Kenny comes in and it's like they come and find him," Schultz said. Montsma said it's because they smell his pheromones, molecules known to trigger responses such as defense and sexual arousal in many animals.
Montsma, 43, travels to about 85 farms, toting his cell phone waiting to hear when cows are in heat. He then matches the cow with the bull the farmer previously picked out.
The semen is generally stored frozen at the farms in a liquid nitrogen tank and after it's thawed in 95-degree water, Montsma finds the cow _ which has likely been gated off in a barn.
He then inserts his arm (plastic-gloved to his elbow) into the cow and inserts the semen in her uterus. The cows generally don't make much of a ruckus, other than the occasional moo. Montsma said it takes him an average of 2.1 times to impregnate a cow.
He grew up on a farm, so the process doesn't bother him, he said. "I'm so used to it," he said. "It comes just like a walk in the park for me." Reprinted 12-12-07 - Originally updated 7-20-06
(The Nation, NY)
By DAVID E. GUMPERT & WILLIAM PENTLAND
In winter 2006, faced with a mandatory program that required him to attach electronic tracking tags on his animals, Michigan farmer Brad Clark sold his cattle herd, and nearly forty years as a cowboy-style rancher came crashing to a halt. Now he's a full-time electrician.
"Cows lose tags like crazy," said Clark. "They get caught in tree limbs. You get an 1,800-pound bull that doesn't want to be tagged, it's an ordeal."
In March, when Michigan became the first state to make parts of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) mandatory, requiring farmers to attach radio frequency identification ear tags on cattle and dairy cows, Clark was already among the casualties.
NAIS, which the US Department of Agriculture has been rolling out in concert with many states since 2003, is stunning in its projected scope. Over the next few years each of the nation's 1.4 million farms (plus thousands of veterinary facilities, export/import stations, livestock barns and genetic facilities) will be affected, with all their approximately 95 million cattle, 1.8 billion chickens, 60 million pigs, 93 million turkeys, 6.3 million sheep, 2.5 million goats and every other livestock species, including bison, camelids, cervids, horses and llamas. In all, more than twenty-nine species and more than two billion animals are slated to be fitted with the ID tags or be injected with transponders that transmit, to a national network of databases, information as basic as date of birth and as sophisticated as DNA profiles and chemical-residue measurements in the bloodstream.
NAIS, ostensibly intended to contain disease outbreaks among livestock, has sparked the most severe political backlash rural America has seen in decades. The controversy stems primarily from the backhanded way the government has imposed a deeply unpopular policy. By introducing NAIS as regulatory changes, the USDA has short-circuited the democratic processes designed to protect the public from government overreaching. Congress has never debated NAIS, and few elected officials have been held accountable for its consequences. The USDA has backed off the original plan to make NAIS mandatory and fully operational by 2009 and now describes the program as "voluntary." While it may be voluntary on the federal level, the USDA has pushed states to make NAIS mandatory for their local farmers.
"Farmers like us, we don't want handouts or disaster payments or loans," said Kim Alexander, who raises livestock in central Texas. "We just want to be left alone to raise clean and healthy food for people who will pay a premium because they know it's clean, healthy and local and not contaminated with a bunch of poisons."
A handful of industry stakeholders have cast their shadow over nearly every component of NAIS--past, present and future. A consortium of industry leaders--Cargill Meat Solutions, Monsanto and Schering-Plough, among others--pushed for NAIS for more than a decade and finally won the USDA's approval shortly after George W. Bush took office in 2001. The consortium, the National Institute for Animal Agriculture (NIAA), designed NAIS for the USDA and includes the USDA's NAIS coordinator, Neil Hammerschmidt, among its alumni.
Critics contend NAIS will be the death knell for small farmers, some religious minorities and organic agriculture generally in America. Although the program will amplify American agriculture's influence in global markets, it will give commercial agriculture an unprecedented monopoly on the future of food--a brave new era of synthetic agriculture and genetically engineered animals.
The USDA compounded this skepticism by encouraging states, with the enticement of federal funding, to impose the program on local farmers. Several states have followed Michigan's lead and implemented various aspects of the program in different ways.
In May, Wisconsin required dairy farmers to register their farms (the step preceding registration of animals). Those with livestock are given a unique number keyed to a GPS monitoring system before they can receive dairy licenses. Many of the state's estimated 10,000 Old-Order Amish claim that participation would violate their religious principles, which bar participation in government programs.
Scores of Amish farmers have abandoned dairy production and others have refused to participate, often forfeiting their licenses to sell milk as a result. Some of Wisconsin's most conservative Amish groups have reportedly considered a mass migration to Venezuela. The Christian Legal Society plans to challenge Wisconsin's registration law as an infringement on the Amish's religious rights.
"It's hugely painful to them," said Karin Bergener, an Ohio-based attorney and farmer who has spent two years raising awareness about NAIS among Amish communities and others. "The thing that comes to all of us is the brutality of treating these animals like widgets. That's probably the way large corporate confinement operations see the animals, but anyone who has raised them--even if you're going to slaughter them--knows that they're not widgets."
In Pennsylvania, a Mennonite poultry farmer sued Pennsylvania's Agriculture Department in June for violating his religious rights by registering him in a state NAIS program without his consent. The state settled the lawsuit a few weeks after it was filed. The settlement terms have not been made public.
Many farmers suspected NAIS would meet stiff opposition from the start, but few realized how aggressively the USDA and state agencies would pursue it anyway. When opposition blocked one means of implementation, some states merely changed tactics, often pushing registration through lower-profile policies. In 2006 hundreds of farmers and ranchers descended on a Texas Animal Health Commission hearing to protest a plan to make premises registration mandatory. A few months after the high-profile defeat, the commission notified farmers and ranchers in a press release that, due to a low-risk bovine disease incident, it would require "identifying all Texas dairy cattle--regardless of age--with an official or TAHC-approved identification device prior to movement within the state."
Similar stories have surfaced in Massachusetts, Missouri and Tennessee.
"What is really unique about the NAIS is that people from the far left to the far right find it appalling," said Bergener. "As long as you're a populist, as long as you believe in independent people running the country instead of big corporations with conflicts of interest, you find the NAIS pretty appalling."
The USDA dismisses many of the program's critics. "Folks tend to make it more complicated that it really is," said Agriculture Undersecretary Bruce Knight in an interview. "The important thing is to have a system whereby in the event of catastrophic animal disease, we can identify everyone in the community and let them know what's going on, and do it within forty-eight hours. It builds off a long tradition of cooperation between American farmers and the federal government."
But Knight acknowledges that NAIS isn't just about protecting livestock. Being able to guarantee in the global marketplace that American farmers can quickly track disease "is a desirable factor with some of our trading partners, certainly in the Japanese export market. Countries like Australia have been marketing their (animal) traceability to gain market share."
Some worry that NAIS technology may be good at tracking animals but not at preventing epidemics. In July a General Accounting Office report said NAIS may not be able to achieve its stated purpose, largely because the USDA has raced to implement a system larger and more ambitious than any other in the world.
Small farmers and ranchers share the USDA's concerns about animal diseases, and some say they might even support NAIS if they believed it would stop the spread of dangerous diseases that have emerged in the past decade. But many worry that NAIS will have the opposite effect. Factory farms are fertile breeding grounds for dangerous new pathogens. The food-borne pathogen responsible for the spinach recall in 2006 and ground-beef illnesses this year originated in feedlots.
The risk of epidemics that spread between animals and humans has grown primarily because of the "inappropriate use of antibiotic drugs," which has fostered the evolution of "resistant forms of bacterial disease," according to a 2006 report by the Center for American Progress. An estimated 70 percent of antibiotic usage occurs in agriculture.
Considering how much noise owners of small farms and ranches are making, they haven't had much of an impact. Their biggest gain may have been the victory in the 2006 Missouri Senate campaign by Democrat Claire McCaskill over Jim Talent. McCaskill opposed NAIS while Talent supported aggressive implementation of it and attracted more money from agribusiness than any other candidate that year. Missouri farmers say McCaskill's position on NAIS was decisive.
But the issue has not raised much interest in Congress. The proposed five-year $289 billion farm bill focuses mostly on subsidies and disaster aid. The only reference to NAIS in the farm bill is a provision that exempts NAIS data from Freedom of Information Act coverage and imposes potential criminal penalties on those who publish NAIS data.
Nebulous details about how NAIS will work have exacerbated resistance to it. According to USDA and state descriptions of the program, farmers will need to keep special records of their animals and update them whenever an animal leaves the farm. Informal arrangements that have long been part of traditional farming--such as trading a cow for a used piece of machinery--must now be reported to the government.
NAIS allows large factory farms whose animals spend their entire lives in feedlots to register large groups of animals as a single unit, but farms whose animals are not confined must register animals individually. As a result, most small farms could pay as much as $20 or $30 per animal to comply with NAIS, compared with $1 to $2 per animal for large farms.
"People don't realize that they're going to have to tag every single chicken," says Gail Damerow, a Tennessee farmer who is editor of Rural Heritage magazine. "When you look at the cost of a chicken or goat and the cost of a tag, it's not going to work economically." Indeed, if the radio frequency tags cost $2 for a chicken that sells for $3 or $4, the thin margins that keep most small farms afloat will vanish.
Then there's the pesky matter of who will control the massive databases with farm and animal information. Although government officials say the tags will only include a limited scope of information related to animal location and movements, the government apparently does not have access to all the data collected under the NAIS program. The GAO report cited as a major flaw the USDA's inability to access information essential for traceability purposes. The USDA has transferred control of the databases to more than a dozen private companies--AgInfoLink, Micro Beef Technologies, iSavent, Global Animal Management, GlobalVetLink and several others. Several of these companies belong to the NIAA consortium that pushed NAIS and most of those that don't have close relationships with consortium members.
"We can all spend time talking about who are the three guys sitting in a room trying to get rid of all the independent farmers," said attorney Karin Bergener. "Or we can try to understand that...a great confluence of interests is behind this thing.... Large corporations want to import or export without having to deal with anything like a quarantine at the borders. Microchip companies have pretty well maxed out their market in Europe for these reprogrammable chips. State bureaucracies need more money from the USDA, and the USDA, which has had its budget cut over the years, will get an astonishing amount of money from running this program. So you have these groups who are having their needs addressed by the program, and the problem is that nobody outside of those groups is involved in the decision-making process."
Intentional or not, an uncanny number of cutting-edge animal biotechnology projects intersect at NAIS.
At a recent animal genetics conference in Switzerland, a team of geneticists described how NAIS-like animal identification systems had "huge potential for a genetic improvement programme where lack of individual identification is one of the main hurdles."
Agribusiness is in a global scramble to secure intellectual property rights over the next generation of biotechnology products. China, Brazil, India and many other countries have accelerated animal biotechnology research. In Canada, Aqua Bounty Farms has patented the first transgenic salmon, which grows to adult dimensions in half the time it takes conventional salmon. Regulators are considering whether to approve the salmon for sale.
The National Animal Genome Research Program, which pioneered the first disease-resistant transgenic cow in 2001, describes NAIS as "a key user" of its national network of genomics resources.
"I'm not really at liberty to say anything about [NAIS] because I don't know how they will be using the databases," said Muquarrab Qureshi, USDA-CSREES program leader for the National Animal Genome Project. "The genome information could be used to identify all the animals there and all the way up to the meat you buy at the grocery store."
Qureshi's comments capture the most maddening aspect of NAIS: it's so vague that it's hard to pin down exactly what it will do or how or even why. The USDA has left NAIS open-ended so stakeholders can maximize the program's potential value by using it as a platform to develop additional processes or systems. NAIS is a set of open-ended standards and protocols that can support a wide range of operations and processes--including genetic tracking--many of which have nothing to do with disease surveillance.
Some NAIS databases may already be tracking genetic data. In 2005, AgInfoLink partnered with Viagen, an animal genomics company that cloned the first dairy cows, to develop a NAIS-compliant data system for the beef industry. In addition to meeting NAIS requirements, the system allows producers and ranchers to "collect, sort, analyze and store genetic information instantly." This information can then streamline "documentation of age and source verification information being demanded in the marketplace today," according to an AgInfoLink press release.
Also in 2005, MMI Genomics, a company affiliated with Cargill and Monsanto, described, in a presentation at an NIAA conference in Kansas City, how NAIS could create "forensic barcodes" for meat products with DNA samples. The samples of every production animal could then be stored in a long-term DNA archive. Other companies have designed radio frequency chips that allow genetic tracking.
"NAIS is going to truly coalesce the food supply," said Bergener. "All the people who like to go to a nice farmers' market so they can buy fresh eggs and chickens from a farmer they can look in the eye won't be have anywhere to go. We won't be there anymore. We won't exist."
But NAIS might destroy far more than farmers' markets. In the past fifty years, industrial agriculture has promoted a handful of high-performance breeds so aggressively that the genetic diversity of livestock has been decimated in developed economies and is rapidly accelerating in developing countries, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Since 2000, at least one livestock breed has disappeared every month, and roughly 20 percent of the world's livestock breeds are at risk of extinction, according to the report. Perhaps the cruelest irony of NAIS is that by hastening the demise of genetic diversity it may ultimately expose the food supply to catastrophic and irreversible risks.
"The security of America's food supply and the resilience of livestock in the face of diseases are best served by the decentralization and dispersal of food production and processing," said Mary Zanoni, during testimony against NAIS before the Texas Animal Health Commission. "[T]he agricultural sciences have demonstrated time and again that the least-cost and least intrusive method is the most effective and protective of health." 12-14-07
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