News

Missouri bill has farm i.d. protections

The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association supports a bill recently introduced in the Missouri House that exempts some data from the federal Animal Disease Traceability Rule from being made public under the Missouri Sunshine law.

Mike Deering, executive Vice President of Missouri Cattlemen’s says they don’t want an incident like the EPA’s over-release last year of livestock producers’ information under the federal Freedom of Information Act.  He tells Brownfield Ag News, “When the personal information of more than 80,000 livestock producers were released to activists groups in 2012, fourteen livestock trucks at the Harris Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley were blown up. They were burned to the ground by a radical animal rights extremist group. And, they got that information where the farm was and all those details from the government and we don’t want that to happen here in Missouri.”

Deering tells Brownfield they want cattlemen to be as open and honest and give all the information they can “for the sake of animal and consumer health.” But, he adds, they don’t want them “to have any fear of that information being in the wrong hands and being used for the wrong reasons.”

The bill is sponsored by Representative Jay Houghton of Martinsburg, Missouri.