American cattle rancher Shad Sullivan told The Epoch Times that he fears that the electronic tags will be the end of the small rancher.

“They are going to use it as a taxing mechanism to eventually control the livestock,” Mr. Sullivan said. “In the European Union, they used these measures under the guise of climate change lies to limit the cattle supply, and if they do that here, it will destroy our industry.

“If the tag mandate is implemented it will be the key to open the door to the gas chamber for independent ranching.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who owns livestock, also sounded the alarm that the move could lead to the erosion of the industry.

“The left wants to ban cattle and before you can ban anything you need a registry, you need to know where it’s at and who owns it and that’s why they want to tag cattle,” he said in a March 23 post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “We’ve seen it happen in Europe.”

In a previous post, Mr. Massie wrote that, if passed, the electronic tracking “will be used by the GREEN agenda to limit beef production, and by the corporate meat oligopoly to DOMINATE small ranchers.”

The omnibus bill, which was passed on March 22, combines six essential spending bills into one and includes text that allocates $15 million to “related infrastructure” needed for the program.

The full text of the provision reads: “The agreement directs the Department to continue to provide the tag and related infrastructure needed to comply with the Federal Animal Disease Traceability rule, including no less than $15,000,000 for electronic identification (EID) tags and related infrastructure needed for stakeholders to comply with the proposed rule, ‘Use of Electronic Identification Eartags as Official Identification in Cattle and Bison,’ should that rule be finalized.”

Since its initial proposal last year, the mandate for electronic ear tags for cattle and bison crossing state lines has stirred controversy, particularly among small ranchers. They fear that the added costs, which large corporate ranchers can absorb, will drive many smaller operations out of business.

Currently, most livestock are tracked using tags that display 11-digit numbers, which are both visible and trackable. On Jan. 19, 2023, the Federal Register published proposed regulations to mandate the inclusion of radio-frequency identification in ear tags. These enhanced tags must be “both visually and electronically readable” to be recognized as official for the interstate movement of cattle and bison.

“Livestock,” under the regulation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service; includes all sexually intact cattle and bison 18 months of age and older; all female dairy cattle of any age; all male dairy cattle born after March 11, 2013; cattle and bison of any age used for rodeo or recreational events; and cattle and bison of any age used for shows or exhibitions, according to the proposal.

Since 2003, following the discovery of the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, in the United States, ranchers have been pushed to adopt electronic identification tags for livestock movement. The cattle industry has been gradually advancing toward enhanced traceability rules and technology ever since.

However, the federal mandating of electronic ear tags would place unnecessary and punitive costs on American ranchers while also further raising the price of beef, according to Justin Tupper, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.

“It is another example of ridiculous spending,” Mr. Tupper told the Epoch Times. “If they are going to use these funds to hand out free tags to those who would want them then there would be no real harm, but that is not what it looks like they are doing here.

“Instead they are going to give them to the big tag companies to shove down our throat to mandate it, which is an entirely different thing.”

A new mandate on livestock would only add another obstacle to an industry already decimated by regulations and drought.

The beef cattle supply has already dropped to its lowest point in decades, raising the price of beef to another all-time high and renewing concerns over the long-term health of the nation’s farming community. A series of severe droughts, coupled with government policies that continue to favor large, industrial food processors, has reduced the nation’s supply of beef cattle to a level not seen since the early 1950s, according to Mr. Tupper.

Lawmakers slipped the funding for the electronic ear tag infrastructure into a single paragraph in the omnibus bill, which allowed lawmakers to pass legislation without the scrutiny that would normally occur and is another example of the increasingly intrusive role the federal government has in the lives of the independent ranchers, he said.

“Anything that is mandated we are going to push back very hard against,” Mr. Tupper said. “We always have to be aware of who controls the data.

“We are well aware of the fact that data can exert a tremendous amount of control over the nation’s livestock.”

The provision could also be the beginning of the end for the independent American rancher, according to Mr. Sullivan.

“The beef industry is the last bastion of freedom,” he said. “Ranchers across the nation have to stand up. If not, these tags will be the end of the small rancher.”

“It’s a red line. It isn’t right that these factory-made products should be able to market and sell their products off the backs of the cattleman,” Justin Tupper, President of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, told The Epoch Times.

“We are talking about chemical-laced cell-cultured products that can in some ways simulate meat, but they aren’t meat, and the American consumer needs to understand that,” added Mr. Tupper.

The synthetic “meat” market has already arrived in America.

Last year, the USDA gave two producers the green light to start producing and selling their lab-grown chicken-like products in the United States.

While a decision over the labeling of the product has yet to be announced, the cattle industry plans on being aggressively proactive in both discussions with the USDA and, if needed, litigation after having learned a valuable lesson from the dairy farmers.

“The milk industry really dropped the ball,” said Mr. Tupper. “They never believed that anyone would think that almond milk was actual milk, so they brushed it off at the time. Now there are hundreds of items with milk in the name but with no milk in the product, and it has really hurt the entire dairy industry.”

“In the same way that you can’t milk an almond, you can’t get meat from a lab, only an animal, and we are not going to allow them to use our name to promote their product.”

Synthetic meat-like products are created by taking cells acquired from animals and placing them in a warm, sterile area, usually, a metal vat, where they are then combined with a solution of chemicals that causes the cells to double once a day.

The demand for synthetic meat has been spurred largely by corporate entities and government agencies working in tandem with the environmental movement.

Bill Gates, an investor in Upside Foods, one of the two synthetic meat producers approved by the USDA, believes meat alternatives are needed to save the world from upcoming catastrophic climate events caused by greenhouse gasses.

In a 2021 interview with Technology Review, Mr. Gates said that all well-off nations need to switch to be completely weaned off of living, breathing cows.

“All rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” Mr. Gates told the interviewer. “Eventually that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift demand. So for meat in the middle-income-and-above countries, I do think it’s possible.”

A switch from animal meat to a laboratory-grown substitute would eliminate the need for animals to be bred and slaughtered—in the U.S. alone, around 9 billion chickens and 32 million cattle are killed every year.

However, beef cattle production constitutes only a small fraction of the gasses that many environmentalists claim have had a negative impact on the planet.

Just 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from beef cattle production, while energy production and transportation produce a combined 54 percent of emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Italian Ban

American ranchers aren’t the only ones raising the alarm. After two million Italians signed a petition calling for a ban against synthetic meat products, the Italian Senate passed a bill earlier this week, becoming the first country to make it illegal to produce or market the food, highlighting health concerns as the primary reason.

Ettore Prandini, President of Coldiretti, the largest association representing Italian agriculture, touted the vote as a legislative victory for the Italian people over corporate powers, telling the media that “the products in the laboratory in the authorization processes are not equated to food but rather to products of a pharmaceutical nature.”

An April 2023 report by the United Nations on the safety of “cell-based food products” cited 53 potential health hazards, including “the potential for expression of novel toxins, toxic metabolites, or allergens or a change in expression of toxins, toxic metabolites, or allergens as a result of genomic instability.”

The report concluded with a call for additional research and funding in order to draw more definitive conclusions.

Transparency Needed

Mr. Tupper isn’t calling for a ban on synthetic foods, only transparency, and believes that despite the large push for meat alternatives coming from corporate leaders and government agencies, the American cow is here to stay.

“The simple truth is that the taste of real beef cannot be replicated and, more importantly, when people discover the chemical storm that is actually in this product they are trying to pass off as meat, consumers are going to come to the conclusion that beef should come from a cow, not from a laboratory.”

“Our hopes are that the USDA will label this product for what it is, a cellular-based derivative of chemicals,” added Mr. Tupper.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.