If anyone recalls, I wrote a post last week about whether or not I should complete my master's thesis. I decided to finish. Originally, I was not going to expand upon it, but after some revisions it turns out that my paper is a bit too lean. It's about disease transmission between wildlife and livestock and includes a statistical analysis of the impact and costs of various scenarios.
The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) relates to this. It's a government attempt to increase monitoring and tracking of livestock animals. I'm looking to write a 10-15 pg section attacking this program and I'm not quite sure how to go about it. Maybe we can brainstorm some ideas?
Paul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Animal_Identification_System
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What grounds are going to attack it on?
The only way I see to attack anything about it are on the grounds that governments wastes and consumes, but never produces. The Idea isn't bad so you can't argue it morally, you could hammer on the means, but that is all I can see. Anyone Else?
Criminals, there ought to be a law.
Criminals there ought to be a whole lot more. Bon Scott.
I work with rfid so maybe I could give you how I would criticize the system. This statement on the wiki:
"Financially, a system as vast as NAIS could be extremely costly."
Replace could with will. There are two types of rfid passive and active, the only economical tag is a passive tag, a passive tag gives no active location information. Therefore they would not know where cows where and when. Passive rfid works in zones, so if you had a reader on each field you would only know which field the cow was in, not a accurate location. Active rfid tags which could give gps locations of animals cost minimum $200 a piece. So either you implement the super expensive active solution and put small farmers out of business, or you use the passive solution and NAIS doesn't achieve is stated goals.
Furthermore tagging information is lost at food processing time, where it matters most. One more thing the cost in implementing an rfid solution is not just the tags its the infrastructure, you have readers and antenna to buy. Small farmers don't have this ability.
Thanks much for the replies. I haven't yet considered this aspect. I was more focused on the part of that article which states that even though the Federal program is mandatory, states are making some parts of it mandatory.
Economic costs are a large part of my thesis. The Wyoming county I'm considering consists of what would be considered small producers by the cattle industry. We graze all of our cattle, especially during the summer and on huge swaths of public land. We don't have those huge cattle lots you see in the midwest. If this ever became mandatory it would put a lot of people out of business.
Are these tags reusable?
Yes they are reusable if they are the non injected type, its not cost efficient to reuse an injected passive tag. It could easily be clipped to a the ear of a cow. Passive doesn't last forever and its unknown how long they will truly be readable. To reuse a tag requires the update of that massive database they are talking about. In my experience the government is terrible at information management. There is a technology out there called a phased array antenna which in theory could be used to sweep an entire field and get an inventory of cows, however in practice this doesn't work well, when all the passive tags send radio waves back they tend to interfere in non predictable ways.
God, I loathe to do this, but if I upload my shitty thesis would anyone be willing to read it and give me feedback? It's awful but my advisors seem to like it. You've been warned.