Tennessee should be leader in cattle tracking, governor says
Bredesen encouraged state Agriculture Commissioner Ken Givens to continue to emphasize Tennessee’s plan to tag and trace beef cattle and suggested that more funding could be directed toward the program.
“There’s an absolute opportunity for Tennessee to really be a leader in this,” Bredesen said. “And we’ll just do it quietly, and when some problem comes up, we’ll be sitting there with a very strong position.”
The Department of Agriculture has identified 5,080 state locations where livestock are kept and next year will begin tagging individual animals, Givens said.
Officials say the registration effort would help them respond more quickly to animal disease outbreaks and to identify cows less likely to have the disease.
Japan’s food commission earlier Thursday declared American beef as safe as its own, paving the way for the government to ease a two-year ban. But a resumption of imports is expected to be limited to meat from cows younger than 2 years old, which lends added importance to the tracking system, Givens said.
“If we can run a trailer-load of calves through that we knew absolutely when they were born, that adds value to them,” he said.
Japan closed its doors to American beef in December 2003 after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease. Mad cow is the common name for the brain infection bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.
Beef cattle, with $514 million in receipts last year, is Tennessee’s largest agricultural product and ranks ninth nationally, department spokesman Tom Womack said.
The department is trying to improve its beef cattle sector in light of the state’s quickly diminishing tobacco crop, Givens said.
“Of all the crops that we have in Tennessee … that’s in really bad trouble ? that’s on life support ? is the tobacco industry,” said Givens.
Tennessee’s annual tobacco crop, which shrank from about $300 million to about $200 million in the 1990s, last year dropped to $135 million, Givens said.
“And this year we will be lucky to hit $90 million,” he said. “So really it’s about 25 percent of what it was say just 10 years ago.”
Many older and smaller growers in Tennessee are using a federal buyout program as a way to get out of the business after President Bush last year signed a law abolishing a Depression-era system of tobacco price and production controls.
Lower demand from cigarette companies and foreign competition have contributed to the decreased production numbers, according to the department.
Bredesen also suggested that the agriculture officials encourage farmers to focus on organic crops.
“You have large specialty grocery stores now selling organic produce at very high prices relative to the rest of it,” Bredesen said. “And I think you’re going to see mainline stores like Kroger and so on do more and more of it.”
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On the Net:
Department of Agriculture: http://www.tennessee.gov/agriculture