HAMMOND — Forty fed-up farmers — including state Sen. Darrel J. Aubertine — gathered Saturday at Hammond Central School to discuss the National Animal Identification System, which would require every livestock owner to have his animals tagged and tracked by the federal government.
Worried about impact of the system's cost on already strained family farms, participating farmers also said NAIS smacks of Big Brother.
"But my cow's already tagged," one objected.
"Not this tag," said Floyd R. Hall, a retired LaFargeville dairy farmer. "It's all about total control."
John Funiciello, coordinator of the Empire State Family Farm Alliance, told the group that the federal animal-tracking system could clear the way for corporations to patent and profit off livestock, much in the way Monsanto does with its seeds.
"The genesis of this program was big business corporate America, that they would have a closer eye on their competition — us," he said. "I think patenting is the direction we're moving in with livestock, so you pay a royalty for every animal born on your premises. But if they don't know where they are, how are they going to charge you?"
A Bush administration initiative, NAIS was established to track where animals and poultry are raised, held, boarded and slaughtered, with the goal of responding more rapidly in case of disease outbreak.
It would require radio-frequency tags for everything from horses to poultry and constant reports on animal movement from farmers and animal owners.
"It makes just about as much sense putting ear tags on bees as it does putting them on anything else, because it doesn't do any good. It doesn't do a damn thing," said Mr. Aubertine, D-Cape Vincent. "Food safety begins at slaughter."
Mary-Louise Zanoni, an attorney from Hermon who runs the nonprofit organization Farm for Life, pointed out that the European Union's animal-tracking system already was in place during the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic that originated in England in 2001.
She also said that the EU, which imports much of the world's beef, pressured Australia and Brazil into adopting animal identification systems of their own, and is now doing the same to the U.S.
The state Animal Identification Program is run by the state Department of Agriculture and Markets, which catalogs the premises and issues a personal identification number that is unique to that farm or property.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the program is voluntary, but will be required in many programs. Ms. Zanoni said that in 2005, the government said NAIS would be made "fully mandatory" by this year or next.
"They realized they were going to cause a huge farmer and animal-owner revolution if they made this mandatory, so they called it 'voluntary' to shut up the grass-roots groups," she said. "Are bureaucrats going to decide what you can farm and what we can eat?"
The event, sponsored by North Country Seed & Feed, could be the first of many community meetings about NAIS, Mr. Aubertine said.
In addition to sponsoring legislation that would require the state to tell farmers that registering for the system is voluntary and they can opt out, he also has asked Agriculture Commissioner Patrick M. Hooker to hold meetings about NAIS across the state.
"I don't think I've seen too many programs as half-baked as this one," the state senator said. "If we're going to be mandated to do a national ID system, then by God, the rest of the world ought to be mandated to comply by our standards."
Ms. Zanoni also claimed that the program has driven some Amish and Mennonite farmers out of agriculture in Michigan and Wisconsin, because they see it as the "mark of the beast" foretold in the Book of Revelation.
While farmers at the meeting didn't go that far, most saw the identification system as one more threat to their already endangered livelihood.
Some of the farmers there already had received a national premises ID after sending in poultry blood test results. One said he has tried to opt out multiple times, but his farm is still in the national system — and marked by GPS.
