A Chat With USDA's Bruce Knight About National ID

Nov 13, 2007 1:58 PM

By Joe Roybal, BEEF Magazine

In early November, BEEF Cow-Calf Weekly chatted with Bruce Knight, USDA undersecretary for marketing, on National Animal Identification System (NAIS) issues. Here's a bit of the give and take.

BEEF Cow-Calf Weekly -- As of Oct. 29, signups of premises under NAIS were at 422,852, or about 30% of premises in the U.S. But aside from premises registration, what other progress has been made with NAIS?
Bruce Knight: I'm in the clearance process for the business plan and I expect a public release in early to mid December. It will get down to the core material work that has to be done to make a successful animal ID system work.

One of the things we're really going to focus on is how to get at and achieve 48-hour traceability by building on the strength of what's worked so well in the past. So it's building on the existing efforts with brucellosis eradication, bovine tuberculosis (TB) programs, Johne's, pseudorabies -- to really use our existing disease programs as a platform to be able to achieve 48-hour traceability in the event of a disease outbreak.

For more of this article go to http://beefmagazine.com/cowcalfweekly/chat-with-usda-bruce-knight/

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