There is a new website up in honor of our President Elect, Barak Obama. He promised us CHANGE and the site is called www.change.org. If you discovered this site before January 1, you probably got in and voted for some Ideas or even posted one of your very own.
I was lucky enough to find Change.org, thanks to information I gleaned from posts on Twitter.com on December 5, and even luckier to have a great Idea that no one had thought of yet. I posted my Idea and sent the link to a few friends. Suddenly I was being inundated with comments on my Idea and it took of like a scalded cat, soaring to first place in the Agricultural Policy category.
By December 30th, my Idea was running neck and neck with three other Ideas and we kept swapping rank as one group or another got out the vote. By the end of 2008, my Idea, alas only in third place, nevertheless made it into the second round of voting.
With the able assist of some great new friends acquired when they read, agreed with, and voted for my Idea, we went into serious ‘Rewrite Mode.’ My little Idea was beefed up with lots of new information and statistics and it grew like Topsy. Finally we were happy with version six or eight, and I logged onto my Change.org account to upload the newly refurbished Idea.
Urk! We had rewritten it up to nearly 5000 characters! Unbeknown to us, there was a character limit of a bit over 2000 words. I then devolved into ‘Gut Mode’ and ruthlessly excised every single redundancy, lost the lovely bullet list, and got the Idea down to a nifty 2000 characters. The system accepted it!
The problem is that we weary rewriters could no longer make head nor tail of the wonderful Idea. We don’t even know if it makes sense anymore. So I am counting on all of those great people, all 1393 of those who voted for the Idea in the first round to come back and read it again then let me know if it still makes sense.
Here’s the Idea: If your have any livestock, I hope to heck that you have heard of NAIS, the infamous scheme dreamed up by Big Ag, Big Technology, and the USDA, to put small farmers six feet under. In a nutshell, if the National Animal Identification System becomes law, it will no longer be possible to find a pastured egg or chicken in the United States and millions of horses will no longer be able to move freely around where ever their owners choose to ride them.
I’ve railed against NAIS frequently in this space. Devoted readers will remember my diatribes against the insertion of electronic microchips into the necks of poultry, cattle, sheep, horses, and other livestock or the demise of food as we know it.
The fight against NAIS has been long and tiring but today it is even more important to defeat this beast than ever before. Unless NAIS is shut down and denied funding, real food will become impossible to obtain. The cost of keeping a few hens or a family cow will soar to the point that the average small farmer will no longer be able to keep up.
When that happens the farmer’s markets will close and all that wonderful farm-fresh produce, meat, dairy, and poultry will vanish from the face of America. Our diet will consist of commodity corn and soy byproducts from wet mills.
If this sounds like a fate worse than death to you, then please go to http://www.change.org/ideas/view/stop_nais and vote for my Idea. The top ten Ideas will be sent to President Obama after he is inaugurated later this month.
He promised us CHANGE, so let’s show him the kind of change we want!
Thanks for all your hard work in getting NAIS and why it will not work into the public eye and to why it will affect and not in a good way, the public stomach.
Over the past few year the ag community has been told to sign up for NAis…their main reasons were animal disease tracking followed with phrases such as “its a done deal anyway” ” you want to protect our food supply, doncha?” “no, we do not know the answers to all your questions, but sign up anyway” ” its free to sign up” Would YOU buy a car or anything like that without knowing all the facts? Even a free car will cost taxes, license, gas to run it, engine repair, etc. And if it does not run, you will not keep it long.