Food prices are climbing, but soon will soar — inflation is ensured due to recent massive spending. As Americans are pushed to consume artificial meat as a solution to the alleged environmental impact of cow farts, the government seeks to expand its techno-monitoring, in the name of “health and safety,” by requiring the RFID chipping of all livestock. The argument is that animal tracking will protect the public from an animal disease outbreak.
This pretense to control all food production for health and safety is reminiscent of the argument that gain-of-function research used to create the COVID-19 virus was motivated not for bioweapons research but to “prevent a pandemic.” Writer Wendell Berry has been warning for decades that government agencies and academic bigshots conspire to destroy farms in the name of helping them.
The federal government, eagerly helped by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets (VAAFM), seeks to implant microchips in all livestock, beginning with dairy cows. But the pretended purpose of tracking safety is not served by imposing these requirements on small producers and on-farm slaughter operations, the businesses that are most thriving even before COVID, but which are the hardest for the federal government to track.
The threat of disease from farm animals is modest at best — especially in tiny, geographically dispersed, often closed (no animals coming or going) herds. My sheep and beef, for instance, are slaughtered on the very grass on which they dropped to the ground at birth — this is “cradle to grave” technology, long in use in Vermont without compromise to the health and safety of Vermonters. Yet, in the interest of “helping” farms with RFID, the VAAFM recommends imposing some $1,500 start-up costs on them, ignoring the economic burden this presents for existing and new small-farm enterprises. It’s as if the VAAFM wants to hurt them. […]
— Read More: granitegrok.com