Island of Distrust
by Karin Bergener

If I’ve learned one thing after working for more than a year against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and getting to know farmers and ranchers across the country, it’s that farmers and ranchers don’t trust the NAIS or the data it will collect on all of us. That distrust will make the results on the 2006 Agricultural Survey extremely inaccurate, because a lot of small farmers didn’t answer it.

Okay. So people don’t trust the USDA. Why does that matter?

Originally USDA had a mission: to protect agriculture and meat processing, and to some degree be involved in marketing. It was supposed to do only what individuals could not. But USDA has so fractured its relationship with the people it’s supposed to help, it can no longer fulfill its mission. And the current people who advise USDA will not bring change to USDA, either. So the NAIS will never be received as a good thing for farmers. How did things go so far wrong?

• Agriculture Survey
• Why Distrust?
• Who Controls USDA?
• Island Mentality

Karin Bergener of Freedom, Ohio, is an attorney and a cofounder of the Liberty Ark Coalition dedicated to defeating NAIS. This article appeared in The Evener 2007 issue of Rural Heritage.