Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
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Digest A
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Volume 53 • No. 5
Double Crossed B by Lee Pitts
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
e very afraid of these initials: ATDF. Be very, very afraid. If you thought the IRS, FBI, or the CIA were scary, just wait till you hear about the ATDF. If you are one of those people who cringe at the thought of the feds taking away your guns, wait until they make you put down your branding iron. If you Google the letters ATDF you’ll find stories on something as harmless as the American Tap Dance Foundation, as serious as a drug task force in Appalachia, or as confusing as something called Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. Remember this: every time you read the letters ATDF in the future just replace them in your mind with the letters NAIS. Sound more familiar? That was the individual identification scheme the USDA dreamed up and spent over $120 million trying to cram down our throats until they realized it was a nonstarter and backed off. Or at least that’s what they said they’d do. In reality, the cattle industry has been double crossed once again by the USDA and now they’ve come up with something even more sinister that they call the Animal Disease Traceability Framework, or ATDF, which is nothing more than a clone of the
by LEE PITTS
OUCH!
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL MAY 15, 2011 •
Riding Herd
“Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.”
old NAIS program. If the feds are able to pull this one over on the beef industry you might as well throw your branding iron away right now. I don’t know what Accelerator Transmutation of Waste means but it sounds like it might be a good description for the “new” animal identification program the USDA has come up with. Or, should we say, the new old program they are trying to revive?
New Saddle, Same Old Horse Derry Brownfield was a rancher and legendary talk radio host, who loved to tweak big government, big business, and their greenie friends on his widely syndicated radio show. I miss Derry and now the American cattle rancher is really going to miss him as we battle the USDA once again over their latest animal identification scheme. Derry helped us win the war over the NAIS but he will not be there to
help this time as the man called “the voice of the heartland” passed away a couple months ago. I just wish he was alive to see how accurate and prophetic his predictions were. You’ll recall that on February 5, 2010, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that NAIS was seriously flawed and that he was killing it off, once and for all. That was after only 36 percent of ranchers signed up, some of them not so voluntarily. Tens of thousands of ranchers helped kill NAIS by writing letters and showing up at USDA listening sessions. Groups as different as the Amish people and R-CALF celebrated their victory and thought that the USDA had learned its lesson and would now work with them on developing a better identification system. They thought they’d found a friend in Vilsack when he said, “The United States needs a flexible system continued on page two
Economics 2 x 4 x 24 by STEPHEN ANDERSON
here is no mystery to genuine economic prosperity. “All Wealth Comes From The Land.” The annual harvest of livestock, poultry and crops, the edible bounty of the oceans, lakes, and streams; the production of all forests and the oil, natural gas and various minerals extracted from the earth itself. These all represent true wealth and when monetized into a nation’s financial system at stable and fair prices, forms the foundation for a prosperous economy. Just as real wealth is created by the farmer, rancher, logger, miner or fisherman when they produce raw materials; so to is real wealth created by the labor of those who process raw materials into useable consumer products. When the wages paid to labor is fair and just, the economy expands in a sound and stable manner. The third phrase of real wealth in an economy is housing, rents and all the myriad of retail business activity that represents the value added to raw materials. The huge service industry adds no real wealth to the economy; it merely circulates the wealth previously created. One simple mathematical equation provides the answer to economic well being. That is
T
“Production X Price = the true G.D.P. (Gross Domestic Production.” In short the combination of raw materials produced, labor and manufacturing of these raw materials, plus the transport and retail marketing of all these finished products available to the end user X the price received at each level of commerce, reveals a true picture of real wealth and the national economy.
Remember, “All Wealth Comes From The Land.” And “Production Times Price.” The last economist who understood how the real national economy works was Carl Wilken. He cautioned that each phase of production and price needed to be in harmony and share equally for a nation to thrive. That’s where the term “Parity” comes into being. On par with, or to share equally. A simpler definition is when mother’s apple pie is cut; all six pieces are the same size. We all got our fair share! Unfortunately, the U.S. economic pie has been cut in increasingly disproportionate sized pieces. The trusts and robber barons of the 1800s have accumulated massive wealth on the backs of farmers and slave labor imported from Europe. The resulting boom and bust cycles in continued on page eight
group of well-meaning but overly-sensitive people are trying to rid the world of pain and suffering, starting with hot iron branding. Believe me, there’s no one in the world who wants to get rid of pain more than me, but as I look around there appear to be many people suffering much more pain on a regular basis than the calves we brand. Take professional football players for example. You’ve seen players prostrate on the ground from being hit in parts unmentionable, but is anyone, besides some neglected housewives, trying to rid the world of Monday Night Football? People get hurt skiing but I notice quite a few animal rights protesters on skis in Vail and Aspen. I once saw a businessman playing racquetball on his lunch hour get hit in the glasses with the ball and he had to take the rest of the day off he was in so much pain. The fact is, sports cause all sorts of painful injuries but I don’t hear anyone saying we should do away with professional hockey or women’s basketball. And think of the poor Chicago Cubs fans. Haven’t they suffered enough pain already? I used to be a runner in high school and college and I can tell you that the pain I got in my side was almost unbearable, and leg cramps kept me up many nights, but I don’t hear anyone calling for a ban on jogging. Anyone who has ever lifted weights or done twenty pull-ups or 100 sit-ups know there is a lot of pain involved. Does this therefore mean we should do away with all exercise? I’m sure being hit by another car doesn’t feel good but I notice we aren’t all walking. And from experience I can tell you that eating too many chimichangas or cherries in one sitting can cause extreme pain. Certainly after eating an entire bowl continued on page eight
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