Monday, June 13, 2011

Just Like a Disney Movie

I felt just like Aurora in the Disney version of "Sleeping Beauty" this afternoon. As I drove down my lane I was escorted by a pair of Indigo Buntings swooping along the sides of the drive in and out of the tall grass. Just as they peeled off into the woods a big, beautiful butterfly rose up off the driveway gravel and headed into the pasture. Then, a rabbit hopped across the drive and as I came through the last cut in the woods a big buck white tail deer crossed in front of me and disappeared through the underbrush. It was truly a Disney like moment and reminded me of why I love living here.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

USDA Kills Tommy Boy

You've not heard from me for the last few weeks. I've been battling the United States Department of Agriculture who put my herd under quarantine and killed my herd bull --- all because no one in that organization would think through a situation and make an informed decision. The machine that runs this organization thinks as little as possible, preferring to follow the "company line" rather than take a leadership role and make informed decisions.

About a month ago a veterinarian from the Ohio Department of Agriculture came to see me at my work to tell me that the farm from which I had purchased my herd bull, Tommy Boy, two years ago, had been found to have cattle infected with a strain of tuberculosis. The ODA was tracking down anyone who had purchased an animal from that farm in the last four years and strongly suggesting that they be slaughtered to determine if they were infected with this very bad disease. My herd would be under quarantine until I could prove that none of them had the disease, but because Tommy Boy came from the infected herd he was considered to be a possible carrier.

TB is a big deal. Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana have been free of it for years and that means I can ship my cattle to buyers in just about any state with no problem. If Ohio was found to have TB in its herds then shipping cattle out of state would become a costly process requiring TB testing of each animal before it could be moved.  TB is transferred to humans in unpasteurized milk and from respiratory expulsions like coughing and sneezing. There is no cure. It is something we don't want to get into humans and its contagious.  It's coming into this country in the white tailed deer populations out of Canada and Michigan.  Word to the wise. Don't feed the deer!!! and don't drink raw milk!!!!

I had no problem having my herd tested, but the USDA held my herd hostage for Tommy Boy. The easy thing for them was to slaughter him and test the tissue. Since he was a breeding stock or seed stock producing bull, one who was rated in the top 10% of all bulls in the breed, I demanded they test him instead. And of course that put them out.

No one else in Ohio demanded the test. They didn't have the test material in Ohio and had to send to San Diego for it. They had to follow orders from the USDA office in North Carolina and watch a power point presentation before they could even administer the test. And, they refused to test my herd until Tommy was tested.

I didn't care. These guys get paid well. Vets who work for the Ohio Department of Agriculture make six figure incomes. I demanded they test my bull. They did two tests.  One was a blood test and one was a skin test.  The skin test is a common enough test but this was a special super duper skin test.  This one had to be administered in a specific way and any change in the skin after the test would be considered a positive, no exceptions.  This was a concern for me since no one in Ohio had any experience of this test and the skin tests are often false positives. I felt confident however, that my bull did not have TB. So did two other  private vets who saw him.

The blood test came back negative for TB. The skin test however, was called as positive because there was a slight change at the injection site. It looked like he had a very small mosquito bite on his bare skin - they shaved the site - something that would have caused no comment in standard TB skin tests.

But the vet who did the test chose to call it a change and pronounced Tommy positive.  Since the blood test was negative and all the other animals that had already been slaughtered and  tested around the state were also negative, I demanded a second skin test. Both Ohio and USDA flat out refused to do another skin test. If he had come back negative on skin and blood, they would still have had to come back and retest him every year and that would have put them out.

Since I can't afford to keep an entire herd of cattle in quarantine indefinitely, I had to let Tommy go. Last Friday they slaughtered Tommy Boy at their lab near Columbus.  He was found to be negative for TB on all counts. My herd was tested this week and all were found negative for TB. We wasted two day of my work time, and the time of 5 ODA employees for two days to find out what we all could have known a month ago if some one in the USDA had had the guts to make an informed decision. If those folks are just going to hand us the company line, then we can hire teenagers at much lower prices to rubber stamp all decisions. That should save the tax payers a lot of money don't you think?

So, some bureaucrat in the US Department of Agriculture  didn't have to put him self out to make a decision, didn't have to put him self out to think the situation through. He just pointed to the regulation and turned his back on me and my farm.

The government will pay me for Tommy Boy, though not as much as he was worth on the market -- and I did my homework collecting the information on the average value of a bull of his age (he was three) and statistics. They paid me a little more than slaughter prices. I'll get the money sometime at the middle of July probably, they think, which is too late in the season to buy another bull.  So, my carefully managed herd that calves in January and February will not calve until late in 2012 if at all. My heifers and cow calf pairs won't bring as much money next year if I even have any to sell - those I can manage to get bred, if I can find someone breed them for me.

I am beyond angry, feeling horribly guilty that I could not find a way to save Tom Tom, as I called him, as well as my farm's most valuable business asset, and heartbroken at the thought of the losses I will suffer next year and the year after and the year after that.

In the meantime, I have lost an animal I spent years working to obtain. He was homo black and homo polled which means all his calves would be black and polled - you get a premium for black, polled calves. He body type and his EPD's (the stats use to value an animal) were in the top 10% of all bulls in the breed. And he was a gentle giant, which is one of the most important characteristic he would have passed on to his calves.

I asked the vet from the ODA why it took them from November of last year until May (breeding season) to contact me, when I know all the cattle from the infected herd would have been tattooed and the origin of the farm easily identified. I have my herd registered with an ID with the State of Ohio and have all my cattle identified with ear tattoos.  The vet let me know that the slaughter houses pay no attention to the tattoos, since the federal government never passed the law requiring all animals to be identified. I was shocked. I thought this was one of the important aspects of Homeland Security's plan to keep our food supply safe.  I guess politics got in the way and the law never passed.

So, there you go. If something bad really does happen in the beef supply you won't know about it in a timely manner.  How does that make you feel?