Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Your beef supply is under attack.
Your food is under attack with your money. Recently, an omnibus bill that was passed in what I would consider the dark of night. Secretly hidden within that bill was RFID tagging mandates for all cattle and bison in the United States. Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm Shelley and I'm rich, and after 25 years in the United States Air Force, we retired and started a small first generation regenerative farm. In the Air Force, I was a fighter pilot. But towards the end of my career, I also worked as a staff officer where I was in a policy office and then spent five years in Washington DC working in the Pentagon. So if there's one thing that I was able to learn in that time, it was how things work in Washington DC. I actually wrote two master's thesis on the civil military relationships. So I got pretty good at what's going on with the civilian side of things and how things are working in Washington DC. So I'm ready to talk about this one.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Your firsthand experience with the actual bureaucrats within DC gives you an absolute better perspective on what's really happening within that district. For the rest of us, I would.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Say it's definitely a different perspective, having been living there, having done it right.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: And now also from the perspective of having a small farm, being a small cattle men, cattle rancher. We call it a farm because we have multiple species, but we do have 30 head of cattle. We are a small farm, and this policy could very, will most likely affect us on some level.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to fight it where we can at our level.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: So I'm hoping that we can stay outside of it. But any military strategist will tell you that hope is not a plan.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: No, I guess not.
That's an interesting concept.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's jump into what's actually going on. I'm going to use an article written in the natural news by Ethan Huff, and this was published on March the Eigth. He starts out by saying, hidden deep within the new omnibus bill is a secret provision to allow the federal government to electronically track all cattle in the United States.
He continues, Representative Thomas Massey, Republican from Kentucky, warned about the hidden provision on X, stating that lobbyists will receive $15 million in taxpayer funds to unleash the electronic tracking grid on the nation's meat producing cows and bison. None of this, warned Representative Massey, is legal. And yet the near total apathy of the american people these days means these kinds of things are easily passable without so much as a peep. From the wider constituency. No law authorizes this. Representative Massey wrote on x.
Wow.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Okay. Thank you, Representative Massey. But I do have one question for you, sir.
In the event you hear this, I would love an answer.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Well, I'm sure he'll see it.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: I'm sure he will. If you know Representative Massey, make sure he does see this. Here's the thing. I absolutely support you. I support what you're saying, and I could not agree with you more. Here's my question. What on earth are the citizens of this country supposed to do about the rules that the bureaucrats make and enforce through Chevron deference in this country, through their agencies? So being that we did not, as american citizens, hire the bureaucrats that are making these rules and decisions, we're fairly powerless outside of our vote for people like you that we rely on to make those changes happen.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Let me tell you a little story, okay? So when I was a major, I worked in US forces Korea. So we were in Yangsan army garrison, downtown Seoul. I worked in the US policy office. So our office was responsible for the international negotiations that happened between the two nations regarding defense matters. And one thing that I quickly learned while in that office, the actual work was done six layers below the secretary of defense. So I think in most people's minds, they think that international relations or big legal matters or laws or things like this, RFID, right. They believe that. Well, that has to be the secretary of agriculture probably is the person that's working on that.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Well, let me tell you, the negotiations that were being done between two nations, six layers deep, was the deputy undersecretary of defense, the Duz D. So not the sect, not the deputy.
If the sect is layer one, layer six is where all of the negotiations were happening. And if the deputy undersecretary of defense couldn't work it out at his level, then it bumped up one level to the deputy assistant secretary of defense, which was level five.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Right?
[00:05:40] Speaker B: So when politicians change out at the top, so the president, and they say, we're going to clean the slate, we're going to wipe this out, and we're starting afresh, we're starting new with drain the swamp. Yeah. Whatever the claim happens to be, they never have, I seen it in over 25 years. They have never gone deep enough to actually change anything because that top layer isn't actually where the work is being done anymore.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Right.
Since it's six down, those people have been there for 20, 25, 35 years within the bureaucratic system in Washington, DC. And those are their people.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: That's right. You get way below the level of the political appointees all the way down into the level of the government service civilians. It's almost, having been a supervisor of many government service civilians, almost impossible to fire them. Almost impossible to fire them.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: So the idea that a senior political official can come in and just make sweeping changes at the level of where things are being done is, to me, ludicrous. That doesn't happen. So if you look at this specific thing.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: So I started digging into who actually did this.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Right. Because I have a feeling that it's not the level or layer the people.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: That I think as a citizen of this country, when I read this.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: My initial thought, and it might be your initial thought, too, was Congress did this.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Right. I mean, they're the ones that put it in the bill. There's an omnibus bill, and they voted on $15 million of our dollars to go to a tracing and tracking system on our food supply.
Then it must have been Congress who dreamed this idea up in the first place.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Well, here we go. Follow the path.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: So the Department of Agriculture is the one that started this whole thing. They called for discussion on this topic in July of 2020. That's when it posted on the federal registry.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Convenient.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah. July of 2020. Think about what was going on in 2020.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: I can't think of a thing.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: So the authority upon which they started acting was an actual law.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: From Congress. And this law states that Congress finds the prevention, detection, control, and eradication of disease and pests of animals are essential to protect different things.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Can't argue with that.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: One of the things is to protect interstate commerce, foreign commerce in the United States, among animals and other articles. Okay, so that's the law.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: We want to protect our. Yeah, for sure.
We don't want.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: That law was acted upon by an agency falling in line with what you mentioned, Chevron deference. And we've had a podcast about that before as well, that the agencies are able to make laws. Sorry. The agencies are able to make rules and regulations based on mandates, based on authority granted to them within the laws that Congress passed.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: So Congress doesn't dig all the way down into all of the details. They just say, we need to keep our animals safe from there. Then comes the.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: It becomes the responsibility of the United States Department of Agriculture to make sure that all the animals are kept safe and healthy and all of.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: So here goes back to my story.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: So the office of the Secretary of agriculture delegates to undersecretaries.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: In this case, the undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs is delegated animal Health and Protection act.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Okay. But they don't actually do.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: No, no. So now we're talking the undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, delegates to the administrator of animal and plant Health Inspection Service.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Okay.
Aphids.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah, aphids they call it. Okay, so we've gone from the secretary to the undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, now to the administrator of animal plant health Inspection service.
That same act, the Animal Safety act, who now is utilizing the veterinary services.
The deputy administrator of veterinary services is responsible for the Animal Health Protection act.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: So deputy administrator is not even the administrator. Administrator, correct. So it's deep.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: So we've gone layer after layer after layer after layer now, deep, deep to the person that's actually. Or the agency administration that's actually responsible for writing and implementing this. So it's not the level that you would assume that it is.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Okay, so you just said this. Let's talk about what this really is. What are the nuts and bolts of what we're talking about they're implementing? We said RFID tagging all cattle and bison within the United States. What is that?
[00:11:50] Speaker B: It is an electronic tag that has a specific number assigned to a specific animal. So they are able to swipe with a wand and electronically identify that animal.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Okay. So we do other things in this country, other products, merchandise and whatnot, for inventory. Say a crate comes in from across the Pacific Ocean, and they can rfid tag and identify everything that's in that crate through one big, huge scanner, big inventory.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Think about stuff your packages that are coming to you in the mail. You can get real time updates as.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: To where they are because of their RFID tagging system that they have in it.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: The technology happened a couple of decades ago when it really started.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: And now what they're wanting to do is use that same technology with our livestock.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Okay, so big deal.
Well, track them.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Yeah, we could.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: And the proponents for this tracking say that it is for disease control and prevention. It's for animal welfare. We are able to know exactly where an animal came from and track it all the way. So if there's a steak that is contaminated, it can be tracked all the way back to the animal, the farm from where that animal originated.
Where that falls apart is the large operations, like the confinement operations, the feedlots, the CAFOs. They're able to get batch tags. So the thousands of animals in their facility all have one number.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: What?
[00:13:46] Speaker B: One number.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Because it's really as if they're one unit.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Well, it's really difficult to do individual tracking.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: No, that's the whole idea. They want individual tracking. Let's track them.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: They want individual tracking at the small farm level.
They're not looking for individual tracking at the huge confinement level.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Hang on a second.
Are you for real right now?
I don't think you did your research. Good.
Are you serious?
Like, okay, then to me, if that be true, we'll trust your research. No kidding.
Okay. To me, if that's true, then it becomes very suspicious that the lobbyists for the large conglomerate meat producers are behind all of this to continue to gain more control over our food supply and push out the smaller farmers.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: So on X, Representative Massey posted an email from the farm bureau.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Okay, we go there.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: That was speaking out in favor of the electronic identification.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Oh, the farm bureau is in favor of the electronic. Really?
So. Oh, wait, who's paying the big bills to the farm bureau?
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Where opponents of this are going in, their thinking is that this is another way to track what's happening and then use that data to weed out the small farmers. So as the small farmers weed out, all of your production is consolidated into the big four. And as long as the production is consolidated into the big four, that's where all of the lobby money is, so it's all easily controlled.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: So the big four, through the lobbyists with the government, are all working together. It'll be real easy to control what's happening there.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah, because, well, if they're lobbying, they already have the department in their back pocket. If they have the department in their back pocket, the likelihood of the department coming after them is pretty slim because they're all in cahoots together. But if those people show up on a small farm somewhere, you don't have a leg to stand on against those people. It's a very difficult fight. And there's a farmer in the great state of Pennsylvania with his own fight against those departments right now, and he is struggling hard just to keep his head above water.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: The only way he's staying is the.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Generosity of other people at this point. And so small farmers, you can't compete against that.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Against the federal government. No.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: But yet the large farmers are helping to create the policies to control your food supply.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: So what do we do, Representative Massey?
What do we do as small farmers? What are we supposed to do as consumers, as concerned citizens, as.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: People who.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Just want good food? Where's food sovereignty?
Where's food freedom? Where's food choice? Where is farm sovereignty in all of this?
[00:17:48] Speaker B: I can tell you farm sovereignty is not in those ID tags. They say us on them or USA on them. And it is illegal to remove those tags.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Okay, y'all know the tags they put on know illegal to remove. That's what it reminded me of when I saw it.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Yeah, but the difference is those tags on pillows, say, until it reaches the final consumer. So, like, if you're the person that buys the pillow, you can remove the tag. That ear tag, once it's put in that animal, it is unlawful to remove.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: If I buy a.
If I. If I buy a cow from a livestock market and it has one of these tags on it.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Unlawful to remove.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Do I own the cow or does the US government own the cow?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Oh, trust me, you own it because you're responsible for its health and welfare.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: But it has their tag on it.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: That's right.
They're going to track it.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: And in the event that something goes awry with it or with anything on a small farm without, they have full and complete control over the actual, well, without a doubt, life and death of.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: That animal, they'll euthanize it.
Look at what happened with poultry last year. The federal government showed up to poultry farms and foamed.
Millions of birds foamed.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Whenever he says foamed, they literally. The federal government, they literally lock the birds into their birdhouses and they fill them with foam and they drown them. That's what they do.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Whether the birds were sick or not.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Sick or not. One sick bird, 10,000 dead.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Didn't matter.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Right. So that's the kind of when they.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Are talking disease reality.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Well, disease control and prevention. By using these tags now, they can track it back to. If there was a sick animal, it's tracked back to your farm, there goes your herd.
And it's unlawful to remove the tag.
If the tag falls out, you have to report it as lost and submit for a replacement tag.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: It's this constant feeling of asking for permission to do with your herd or your animals or your food or whatever from these entities. I'm constantly feeling like there's something that I'm supposed to be asking for. May I? Please.
Yes.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: On everything.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: And from what I can tell, Representative Massey is on our side on this.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: I know he is. I know you are.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: He's a proponent of the prime act, which would allow custom processed meat products to be sold where currently they're not. Right. So I do think he's with us.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: I understand your frustration of. Okay, but what are we supposed to do, right.
I think it is voting. It's being informed, it's speaking out for you guys. Just listening to this, just informing yourself, just watching us chat about it, becoming involved in the conversation, learning about what's actually going on. 15 million of your dollars are being spent on this, okay?
[00:21:27] Speaker A: But to be the devil's advocate, the person on the other side of the screen, you may very well think that traceability for disease control is a very good thing.
A lot of the cattlemen, the ranchers who are against this policy say they've been doing a pretty darn good job for a whole lot of years, making some of the best, safest food in the world. In the world.
They've been doing it right for a lot of years. They do not need the added expense, the added headache, the added time, just the record keeping alone on these farms, especially small farms, got a lot going on. They probably have a town job too, and they're just still trying to raise some cows. And the added time and energy and regulatory compliance that it takes in order to be able to maintain things at the compliance level is just unsustainable. And so let's say you've got some of these ranches out west or in Texas that have a couple thousand head, they got to keep track of all these things, right? Just the sheer record keeping. Record keeping. And they already keep amazing records of what's happening with your beef supply. Because let's face it, it's our beef supply, it's our food supply. And what's that going to do to the prices? It's just more inputs that that rancher or that farmer is having to have. And it may only be a couple of dollars per head, it may only be a little bit of it. Every little bit counts. Every minute, every penny, every dollar, every pencil marking. It takes resources. And anytime you take resources from the farmer, it costs the consumer and you've already paid for it once to the tune of $15 million just to make sure that the big guys have the tools they need. That's what that $15 million is for. It is to make sure the tools to the tags and the tag readers and all of the implementation tools are there for the big guys. Trust me, they're not just sending us stuff for free and rest assured of that.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: But we can volunteer. What for?
A site identification number? A pin? A premise identification number?
[00:24:13] Speaker A: No.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Volunteer for you surprise me.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: I'm sure, I'm sure I surprised them too.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: You don't want a pen?
[00:24:24] Speaker A: No.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: A voluntary premise identification number to go along with your USA unlawful to remove tags.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Wow. On my cow that I bought and take care of and feed and.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: No, it doesn't belong to USA Department of Agriculture. Yeah. No.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Not even the veterinary services?
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Not even the veterinary services.
Not them either.
So in the event that these regulations are broadly enforced across all the cattle in this country, by the way, I believe that the average rancher, the average herd size, I should say, within the United States, is about 45 head. So that means there are a whole.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Lot more very small farms like us.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Right. Than there are the huge ones.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: What does this implementation to our way of life, to the farmer who wants to grow food at a smaller scale, what does this really mean to our way of life?
[00:25:48] Speaker B: To me, it is an erosion of our freedoms.
We didn't vote for it, we didn't agree to it, and yet our ability to farm the way we want to is at jeopardy.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: I think.
I agree. Another thing, that it will erode not just freedom, but it would erode just your sheer privacy.
In the event that you want to own and raise bovine, you're going to have to submit all of that information to the federal government.
So a lot of people would be quite deterred by that.
How many people that are proponents of freedom and privacy would bow out because they don't want to do that? And what does that do to our continuing shrinking beef supply in this country?
[00:27:05] Speaker B: It continues to consolidate it into the big companies. Another factor to this is that a lot of people see this as just a guise for further movement on the environmental side of things.
A way to score you on your ESG, your environmental, social and governance score. If you're a cattle producer, your ESG score is going to be low because the claim is that cattle have such an impact on the environment. So your environmental score is going to be low. So if the government is able to track every single head of cattle that you have, that's how you get a really bad environmental score. And you want to know what happens with ESG tracking? Look at China. Look at what they're doing. Look at the apps that they have on their phone to where you can't go outside. If you have a red symbol around your face on your app, you have to have a green symbol in order to go outside. You can't get on the subway unless you have a green symbol around your face.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: What you're saying is true, and some people might be listening to that saying, there's no way.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: Oh, yes, there is.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Right now.
And if you don't think that stuff like that can come to this country.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: You weren't alive in 2020, then you.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: Were not breathing in 2020 as we.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Started talking about passports, right. Tracking our own status.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Our jab status, and whether or not you can go to work.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: Without a passport.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Guys, we got to be careful with each passing law, with each passing regulation, with each addition. Have you heard recently of them going, hey, you know that regulation we had. Never mind that.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll get rid of that one.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: We'll get rid of that one. No. When was the last time that you heard of a regulation going away?
[00:29:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that doesn't very often.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: All we do is we keep adding more and more regulation to our lives, taking away more and more freedoms, removing more and more privacy every single day. And if we don't wake up and start writing our congressmen, writing our representatives, getting involved at the state, local level of what's going on with our policies, our food vote, I guess we just have to vote, but we've got to pay attention and we have to start making our voice known and stop being afraid to say the words, yeah, I am against this.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: And I have the right to say that.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: And I'm going to. I am against this.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: I do not want this on my cattle.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yes.
So that's what's going on in your food industry with your beef, and it is steaming ahead.
We'll just keep an eye on what's actually happening with it. It is alarming.
Every day, the situation with our food supply gets more and more alarming. But the best thing that we can do is continue to grow the best food that we can.
Make sure look up a local farmer near you that's growing the best food that they can that's near you and tap into that food supply.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Thank you guys for hanging out with us again today. I hope this has been a really informative podcast for you. We are very concerned citizens of this country. We are proud to be citizens of this country, but we are concerned. We're going to continue to voice our opinions about what's going on, and we just thank you all for everything. And until next time, bye bye.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: Okay, that's podcast.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: Matthew. Don't freaking call me.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Don't be surprised.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: No, I won't.
