National Animal ID tags get lost in Britain

A number of farmer bloggers have long said that ear tags are a lousy way to permanently identify cattle. If you have cows and use tags, it is simply obvious that they get lost. Often. Sometimes in our yearling pens only one or two will still have tags even though they are all tagged as babies.


In Great Britain where animal ID rules are so stringent as to be absurd, that exact conclusion is coming to the fore.




This is still not good enough for authorities there who fined a farmer for having cows leave the farm with two tags and get off the truck with one.
And they were really, really ticked off when he won his court appeal.



I hope farmers here in the USA continue to fight national ID as hard as they can. The cost if the program is implemented is going to be staggering



Um, gee, that tagging thing really worked out good didn't it....at least for the ear tag companies.


And here is another good article on the cow tax....wherein you can see that this suddenly became a hot button issue because our new president elect is solidly on board with the big bucks for carbon trading, global warming bunch. He is threatening Congress with EPA action on this matter and using farming as a bargaining chip.


Here is what the Cattle Site had to say about emissions from dairy cows.


Here is something else that really ticked me off at the time (and is making me even less happy now). Our Dairy Check Off dollars (to the tune of six million of them) were pledged by our trusty leadership to fund an EPA study of emissions on dairy farms. We are forced to pay the check off out of our milk checks before we even see our money. It is supposed to be spent to promote dairy products, which is an admirable goal. It was NEVER INTENDED to be handed to a government agency to help them find a stick to beat us with.