With the potential for New World Screwworm to enter the United States, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is recommending producers take the proactive step of securing a premise identification number. We caught up with Sigrid Johannes to learn more.
“Another thing that you could do right now to get prepared if you’re again in that southern part of the United States is register a premise ID. If you have gone through this process already for flying with interstate official animal ID requirements, if you’re moving cattle that fall under that covered class of cattle under the 2024 rule, you’ve probably already gone through this process. If you live in a state like Florida that has intrastate tag requirements, you might have also already gone through this process. But the bottom line is, if we have an outbreak in the US, the playbook does specify that any animals moving out of an infested zone to an area that is not yet infested will need to have that official individual animal ID,” said Johannes.
“And getting official individual animal ID, as many folks already know, does require you to have a premise ID. So you don’t have to start tagging things now, but you can go ahead and save yourself some time by registering that premise ID today. Hopefully you don’t have to use it, hopefully that’s not where we end up, but it will save you some time and streamline the process to, again, keep the supply chain flowing if you unfortunately end up inside an infested zone in the US,” said Johannes.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.