After a winter of meetings with angry producers, the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency has agreed to ease into its new identification program.
After more than four years of discussion on the use of an ear tag that would allow an animal to be traced to its original herd in case of disease, producers said they didn’t have enough time or information about the program.
They want the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency to slow down.
“A lot of producers claim they didn’t know about the program and were afraid they would be caught in the enforcement before they were ready for it,” said Carl Block, agency chair and a cow-calf producer from Abbey, Sask.
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“We just want to give everyone a little more time.”
The program will still begin Dec. 31, 2000, but cattle that leave their home herd don’t have to be tagged until July 1, 2001. At that time, packing plants will be required to read all tags.
Ear tags, which could be read by a scanner in a packing plant, were not readily available early in the calving season.
“We felt we had to recognize that,” said Block, who has traveled to many information meetings telling producers about the system that will be able to identify each beef animal in Canada.
“We have to get the message out there that it
isn’t some sinister government plot. … If you don’t understand something, it’s easy to read something into it,” said Block, who said the agency was formed out of the industry’s desire for a trace-back system in case of a disease outbreak.
Cattle that leave the herd don’t have to be tagged until July 1, 2001 and mandatory enforcement will begin a year later on July 1, 2002.
Julie Stitt, general manager of the agency, said it is hoping the delayed start will encourage more producers to buy into the program.
Although the agency has held information meetings across the country, she blames human nature for much of the concern. People brushed off the program as too far away to be worried about when it was first discussed in 1996 and when the agency was formed in 1998.
Marwayne, Alta., cattle producer Art Wheat just doesn’t like the tagging program: “Here we have someone telling me what to do. I have no use for the ID system.”
Cost is one reason. While each tag costs $1, it adds up to $1.8 million a year for Alberta beef producers and $5.76 million for Canadian beef producers.
“That’s a lot of money taken out of producers’ pockets,” said Wheat, who runs a 250 cow-calf herd in eastern Alberta.
As a producer who must buy the tags, he objects to the cost when large feedlots will reap the benefit. Instead of buying their own ear tags, feedlots can save thousands of dollars by using the existing agency tag for identification in their feedlots, said Wheat.
But he also believes the existing brand inspection system is an effective trace-back system and doesn’t cost anything.
