When I try to explain Greg Niewendorp’s civil disobedience to friends or acquaintances who aren’t familiar with the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), I usually get this response: So what’s so bad about tracking farm animals? Won’t that help prevent disease?
Implied in these questions is this: the diseases are so terrible, and the “solution” seems so harmless. What’s the big deal?
I sometimes find myself stammering in response…it’s costly to farmers…it violates their privacy…it’s a prelude to tagging and monitoring people…etc., etc.
But in watching the intense debate about Greg Niewendorp unfold around my original post, I realize there is something much more fundamental involved. It’s about our ongoing desire to systematize business to the Nth degree, and appreciating why small-farm agriculture doesn’t necessarily fit into that tendency. (I am amazed at the depth of many of the responses, and especially want to thank MichiganFarmer-Trish for her first-hand insights into farming.)
In many product industries, systematization works well. The classic example is ever-cheaper and more powerful computer chips, which enable us to use laptop computers to easily produce blogs and huge e-commerce web sites and communicate with ease via email (among many other applications).
Once living things are involved in such moves to ever-increasing efficiency, there can be glitches. Witness the ever-increasing difficulty of traveling via air, and specifically the JetBlue fiasco of the last few weeks.
There is a natural desire to apply this same mentality to agriculture. Indeed, it has been applied. Unfortunately, there are some big problems. Fast-spreading disease, loss of nutritional benefit, small-dose poisoning from antibiotics and hormones, pollution of steams and fields around hog-production sites and the squeezing out of the little guy. Now, from a business viewpoint, I know this last problem is viewed as “something we can live with, if it benefits the larger society.”
But there are other even larger problems. The systematization that has occurred in computer chips has been the result of intense competition. Indeed, we might even say it’s a result of a hands-off attitude by the government. Let the chip companies battle it out, and the market will be the ultimate arbiter.
But the systematization now being pushed in agriculture in the form of NAIS is coming from the government. And not even from our elected representatives, but rather from bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state departments of agriculture.
If it was just competition driving small farms out of business, that would be one thing. But when the government is pushing them out because they won’t conform to increased regimentation that they are resisting for sound business and animal health reasons, well, that is something else.
Small farms increasingly apply techniques that avoid the problems of industrial farms. Fewer animals. No antibiotics. Farm grazing. Recycling of wastes. Perhaps most important in this discussion, there is a lower risk for disease because of such seemingly uneconomic techniques.
The small farms understandably don’t want to be forced into a system that promotes values they are avoiding. Unfortunately, this explanation doesn’t conform well to a 30-second sound bite.
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