Privacy: The Final Chapter

Unless something changes in the overall NAIS, or it begins to affect me more significantly at our farm, I will not be blogging about NAIS or privacy after this entry. We’re beating a dead horse, no pun intended.

It’s obvious that the nation is polarized on the issue of wiretapping. There are those that feel that the President acted within his power when authorizing the wiretaps. There are others who feel that he did not. We can discuss it until the cows come home, but it doesn’t really matter what conclusion we come to. It will ultimately be decided by the government as to whether he acted appropriately or not. We can make interpretations about privacy and law, but the legal judgment rests with the court and with Congress. It’s good to have dialogue here, and we have done that. If we want to turn our words to actions, we need to communicate with our legislators.

Regarding the NAIS, a comment was made about my use of the example of the Oklahoma City bombing and how government did not place more restrictive regulations upon rental trucks and fertilizer. I believe I made my point, as I initially stated. The commenter said that I was “reaching” and had proved his point that RFID tags would allow us to “catch” the source of contamination in the same way that the license plate allowed the authorities to catch Timothy McVeigh. What this commenter does not consider is that there are ALREADY checks in place that allow us to track livestock entry into the food supply! (The “license plate example.) Do you think a farmer just drops old Bessie off at the slaughterhouse no questions asked?? Of course not! And the paperwork and checks that are currently in place are affording the public protection from BSE, eColi, and other diseases. Putting a radio tag on my llama is unnecessary, and does NOTHING to support any further protection of the food supply. How does any of this PREVENT problems? It doesn’t. And it won’t CONTAIN problems any better than the current system does. The NAIS will not apply the same to producers across the board! My neighbors and I will be required to tag every animal we have. Big Ag will not. They will be allowed to record information on a herd as one animal. Where do you think the bulk of your food comes from? What about the bulk of the disease? Four processors control 80% of the beef that goes to four companies that control 90 percent of the meat sales in America. (source: industry data found on meatpoultry.com) I also attempted to locate information on the sources of the two BSE-infected cattle that have been detected in the US. The USDA releases very sketchy information, but their press release notes that the cow which tested positive in 2003 came from a factory farm in Washington. Details on the 2005 cow from Texas are scarce. They do note that some of the animal’s herdmates had to be tested, and “some” amounted to 208. An additional amount of calves from the farm had to be tested, and the additional amount was 213. So there were a significant amount of cattle being raised at this farm, if it was not a factory farm. This is a much different scenario than my farm, or my neighbor’s farms. These will likely be the very operations that will not be affected as much by the NAIS, because they can register their herds as one entity.

Of course the public demands accountability in the food supply. I eat the food, I also demand that accountability. But this will not afford us that accountability. It will serve to provide a false sense of security to the general public who do not understand what it entails, and it will ensure that food prices increase. In my last post I addressed the record keeping and management standards that successful producers need to maintain. If an animal leaves my premises with the NAIS in place, I will have to file a report. The producers who are crappy record keepers will neglect those reports as they neglect their records today. And those with bad intentions will find a way around it. Ear tags can be lost, replaced, faked, misread, and cheated just about any way imaginable.

The point is well taken with the credit card companies, websites, and other businesses that collect my personal information. And I fight with them as well about privacy. Just because I don’t blog about it, doesn’t mean one should assume it doesn’t concern me or that I am not doing anything about it. But to roll over and say, “Well, everyone else has my personal info, I’ll go ahead and RFID my animals, too” is just dumb.

I made this comment in an earlier post: If you notice, I am quite anonymous—I don’t mention my location (just general), or my name, or my company, etc. If you wanted to find me, you couldn’t (I hope).

I can see where I led you to believe that I thought I had a heavy veil of anonymity. Of course I am not anonymous. Very few people are. And, if I had truly been concerned with anonymity, I would not have registered my domain in my real name with my real address. I would have an unpublished phone number. Frankly, I would have stayed off of the Internet. I live in a small town, and everybody knows the name of my farm and me. You can look up my address and see what my property value is (and look up if and when I paid my taxes). You can even check out a satellite photo of my land. If you go to this website , you can look me up and see how old I am, and other family members that I might have lived with in the past—maybe see who my siblings are and where they live. You can find my phone number, and you can do a reverse lookup and find my address that way, too.

So, no apology necessary for “my heart stopping” as you did not tell me anything I didn’t already know. I am not naïve (about that, at least).

Ultimately I hope to sell my animals, and we will heavily market our name and brand to our customers. The organizations to which we belong will list us as members. It would be silly for a business to not list a way to contact them. With that increased marketing comes a loss of privacy, but a loss that we have determined to be an acceptable risk and price.

As I said before, this world is a risky one, and we all have to assume this risk. I, for one, will not depend on (or even ask) the government to insulate me from any potential danger at the expense of my own right to choose.