The US Department of Agriculture says NAIS is needed to "protect the health of U.S. livestock and poultry and the economic well-being of those industries." NAIS, it avers will enable the USDA to quickly and effectively trace an animal disease to its source so we'll know exactly which animals are sick and where they are. But there’s much more to NAIS than meets the eye. Many small ranchers and farmers see it as a threat to their very existence. In fact, the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund has recently signaled its intention to sue the USDA (and the Michigan Department of Agriculture) to  “immediately suspend the funding and implementation of NAIS,” and “fully and fairly examine” whether there is even a need for such a program.  More info can be found on the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund site. 

Good news on this front.  In early August, Monsanto announced that it was going to sell it's milk business and get out of promoting what some call  rBGH, some  rBST or bST or what Monsanto calls Posilac®.  Word is, they want to focus more effort on GMOs.  Both are controversial. Google the term bovine growth hormone and the first defender of giving this hormone supplement to cows to increase their production shows up on the bottom of page 8. It's the FDA’s denial of a petition to rescind approval for Posilac. The denial said that the petitioner’s arguments “… do not demonstrate any human food safety issue related to the use of Posilac.” There are a lot of folks who disagree.  Wonder if the buyers, whoever they might be, will continue to promote its use.

Sometimes abbreviated as GM or GMO (for genetically modified organisms), these foods are already on most of our plates. In fact, over 90 percent of the soybeans and nearly 80 percent of the corn grown in the US is genetically modified. The battle that’s raging now is over whether more of our foods should be.