Testing for BSE - more

A nice article on Creekstone Farms in USA Today. I had written about them last March: Testing for BSE The USA Today article covers a lot of what I had written about but adds some new information that makes me even more glad that we have our half a cow in our freezer. We made a connection with the sister of someone who raises pigs organically and we will be getting a whole hog sometime next spring. From USA Today:

Mad cow watch goes blind
Creekstone Farms, a Kansas beef producer, wants to reassure customers that its cattle are safe to eat by testing them all for mad cow disease. Sounds like a smart business move, but there's one problem: The federal government won't let the company do it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture -� invoking an obscure 1913 law intended to thwart con artists from peddling bogus hog cholera serum to pig farmers -� is blocking companies from selling the testing kits to Creekstone.

USDA is doing the bidding of large cattle barons afraid that Creekstone's marketing will force them to do the same tests to stay competitive. It's true that the incidence of mad cow disease is quite low. But there's little logic in stopping a company from exceeding regulations to meet the demands of its customers, or protecting its rivals from legitimate competition.

Not only is USDA blocking Creekstone, the department said last month that it's reducing its mad cow testing program by 90%. The industry and its sympathetic regulators seem to believe that the problem isn't mad cow disease. It's tests that find mad cow.

The department tests only 1% of the roughly 100,000 cattle slaughtered daily. The new plan will test only 110 cows a day.

By cutting back on testing, USDA will save about $35 million a year. That's a pittance compared with the devastation the cattle industry could face if just one human case of mad cow disease is linked to domestic beef.

The scaling back on testing was news to me. Here is another:

Scientists don't know the exact cause of BSE but think it's spread when cows are fed ground-up parts of cattle and other cud-chewing animals. The government has tightened cattle-feed rules, but loopholes still permit cattle blood as a milk substitute and chicken waste as a protein supplement.

I knew that they were tightening up the feed rules but I had no idea about the blood and chicken waste (offal, feet, feathers) loopholes. A bit more:

Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of fears that the testing isn't rigorous enough. As a result, U.S. beef product exports declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the USA, to $1.4 billion last year. Foreign buyers are demanding that USDA do more.

"In a nation dedicated to free market competition," says John Stewart, CEO of Creekstone, which is suing USDA, "a company that wants to do more than is required to ensure the quality of its product and to satisfy customer demand should be allowed to do so."

When regulators disagree with reasoning like that, you know the game is rigged.

Rigged the same way that the big producers are trying to ram NAIS down the throat of the small farmer without any thought being given to its implications. I have written about NAIS before and if you are at all interested in preserving the small family farm or have any interest in riding horses, agritourism, agricultural fairs (The Puyallup Fair and the NW Washington Fair are but two of WA State's fairs) or such excellent school programs as FFA or 4H, you need to be very active in stopping this odious bit of legislation.