USDA Proposes Amendments to APHIS's Traceability Regulations

USDA published a proposed rule which would amend U.S. animal disease traceability regulations to require eartags in cattle and bison that are both visually and electronically readable — electronic identification (EID) tags.

Some changes have been made to a prior APHIS plan, including now the agency using the term EID tags instead of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. APHIS said that is to accommodate the potential for future technologies other than RFID relative to the tags.

Industry Responds

Ethan Lane, vice president of government affairs at NCBA, broke down the timeline for the transition to EID tags in Thursday's AgriTalk.

"We currently have the RFID tag rule that we saw at the end of the Trump administration that took a three or four year period to ramp up and transition to," Lane says. "This EID tag will go live as soon as it is finalized, which is likely to be a year to 18 months."

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According to Lane, the proposed system is a nod to ever-evolving technology and will be a "better" tool than RFIDs.

So, why is another being pushed so hard right now?

What's at Stake

The EID system is aimed at helping the U.S. cattle industry deal with the emergency response to animal disease events, with APHIS concluding that while foot and mouth disease (FMD) and other diseases have been largely excluded from the U.S., “exclusion of every high impact disease through every pathway of introduction is likely an unachievable task.”

Kent Bacus, NCBA's executive director of government affairs, echoes APHIS, saying FMD is one of his association's biggest concerns.

"We haven't had a case of FMD in the U.S. since the 1920s, and there hasn't been FMD in North America since the 1950s," he says. "We have a very naive herd that would be devastated by FMD, as would other hoofed livestock."

Disease management tactics aside, Bacus says the domino affect FMD would have on the supply chain that is continuously being soddered and broken would be "catastrophic." He points to highly-pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and African swine fever (ASF) as examples.

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"There's no cure for any of it [HPAI, FMD and ASF]," Bacus says. "The best thing we could hope to do is track and vaccinate our way out of it."

Thanks to APHIS's EID plan, those tracking efforts are being put in motion.

The Gameplan

Under the proposed rule, APHIS would require tags to be used that are both visually and electronically readable for interstate movement of cattle and bison six months after a final rule is published in the Federal Register.

Comments on the APHIS proposed rule are due Mar. 20. There is not yet a definitive date when the plan will finally be in place.