Hello! We are crowdsourcing information to collect the public’s ideas on improving federal food and farming policies in the United States, organize them, and present them to the administration for consideration.”
We want to know what federal policies work for you and what don’t work. Those ideas that are very specific, and especially those that cite the relevant rules or regulations that can be changed to improve on current policies, are most likely to get attention.
1. For example, “Electronic ear tags on cattle, required since last November, do not improve on existing cattle identification tags and are expensive for small ranchers, increasing the financial pressures that lead thousands to leave the industry each year and increase the need for lower quality beef imports.”
2. Examples:
- Large ranches can receive a waiver and require only one tag for a herd
- 141,000 small farmers and ranchers left the industry in the past 5 years
- Visible ear tags have worked fine for decades without problems identifying diseased cattle
- The US increasingly imports beef and we need to support more domestic beef cattle-rearing
3. An improved policy would be to leave the system in place that was used for decades, until last November.
4. Revoke the USDA rule requiring ear tags for cattle. This is a final rule by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published May 9, 2024, effective date November 5, 2024 (89 FR 39540)
