The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) may be better named the Farmer Aggravating and Regulatory Threats Department (FARTD).
Its recent move to require electronic ear tags on cattle and bison crossing state lines will not increase food safety, but will financially burden small farmers, raise food prices and may lead to more onerous regulations in years to come.
First, current regulations already provide for rapid tracing of animals. Since new guidelines were adopted in 2013, it’s now 42 times faster to trace an animal than prior to that time.
And in 2020, additional changes were made. As a result, “by 2022, more than half of States were able to complete any one of the four trace exercises in about a half hour,” according to an analysis by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a division of the USDA.
If anything the mandate could cause more errors, as metal tags have nine numbers that need to be transcribed manually and electronic tags have 15 that must also be transcribed manually as ranchers don’t yet have the hardware and software to automate the process.
Furthermore, electronic tags won’t stop the spread of fast moving diseases like foot-and-mouth disease, but can only act after detection.
If they acted as electronic disease detectors they could be very helpful, but at this point they can’t and with tracing capabilities already very fast, why must they be mandated instead of suggested?
Besides, only about 11% of cattle and bison meet the criteria for the tags, which means their impact will be extremely limited. In addition, unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses are the source of many illnesses connected to beef – something tags can do nothing to prevent.
The USDA estimates that the mandate will cost farmers a total of $29.3 million nationally – but that only includes the cost of the tags, which are about $3 apiece.
By comparison, metal tags cost between 10 to 15 cents. It has not estimated what it will cost to buy scanners and software necessary to fully automate the process, which will be millions more, especially if the mandate becomes universal in the future, which is the stated goal of the USDA.
Evidence out of Michigan does not bode well for small producers, which are in the majority in Wyoming. (The Small Business Administration defines small beef cattle farm and ranch operations as those with less than $2.5 million in annual sales.
APHIS data shows that about 99% of beef cattle operations are below that threshold.) That state lost 4,445 farms that had fewer than 500 head of cattle between 2007— when it implemented mandatory electronic identification for intrastate cattle—and 2022, the most recent agricultural census.
The loss rate was 28 percent above the national average, according to Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, an advocacy group suing to stop the mandate in federal court in South Dakota. Large cattle operations in Michigan also consolidated much more quickly than the national average during that time period. Given that Wyoming lost 12% of its farms between 2017 and 2022, a rate higher than the national average of 7%, adding this new regulation will only make it more difficult to survive for smaller producers and means consumers will face higher prices as ranchers pass on their costs.
As Kenny Fox, a third generation South Dakota rancher who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the USDA, said, “this whole thing is nothing more than tagging companies selling tags and technology companies technology to people who can’t afford it. It should be a voluntary program.”
With the heightened surveillance of tags will come the ability for the federal government to expand its reach into ranchers’ operations. Knowing exactly how many cattle ranchers own means the ability to tax cows based on their greenhouse gas emissions as has been enacted in Denmark, to start in 2030.
It could also mean forced slaughter if, for example, the USDA decided that the number of heads of a particular operation was adversely impacting federal lands or violating climate policy.
So, while tags may be advocated as a means to more efficiently trace disease, they could be used for a number of totally unrelated purposes.
A new secretary of agriculture in the Trump administration could and should reverse the mandate on arrival.
But the USDA should immediately revoke the order and let producers decide how to best contain and prevent disease in their herds.
It should be in the business of increasing American food security and supporting state and national ranchers, not accelerating their demise.
As Wyoming Republican Congressman Rep. Harriet Hageman said in a statement, “this is an unreasonably expensive unfunded mandate that will lead to the elimination of small producers, vertical integration of our livestock and meat supply, put herds and ranches at risk through invasive Freedom of Information Act requests, and imposes an unbearable cost burden on all but the largest corporate producers.”
Marta H. Mossburg lives in Riverton, WY. She is a research fellow at Mountain States Policy Center, which advocates free market solutions to policy problems in Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Idaho.
