Absolutely unbelievable! As a person that lives in the country and raises cattle, I think that article is despicable. Talk about twisting the truth.
Australia introduced a similar measure in July 2005 - National Livestock Identification System (NLIS). We are now obliged to tag or bolus animals with a scannable computer chip, but only under certain circumstances. If the animal is bred on your property and is being sold directly to the abattoir for meat, there is no need for a tag. If the animal is being onsold to another breeder, then it requires a tag. It's basically to give traceability in the event of disease.
We are fortunate enough not to have Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Foot and Mouth Disease in Australia and our quarantine experts are doing their best to make sure we don't. However, we do have a cattle wasting disease called Bovine Johne's Disease (BJD). Up until recently, Western Australia was declared BJD-free. This conferred considerable advantage for us, as we were able to export animals to the eastern states without much hassle.
Recently however, there has been a confirmed outbreak of BJD not far from Albany. Unfortunately, the NLIS has been in place for too short a time to be fully effective in this case, but it was still used to track recent cattle movements from the affected property.
As cattle producers we are happy to have this measure as a form of insurance - if we can prevent the spread of diseases, it's got to be a good thing.
In the UK and Europe, they have gone even further. You can now purchase meat from the butcher and know exactly whose property it was raised on, what breed it is and so on. Restaurants use it as a selling point - this is premium Limousin beef grown at Halcyon Park in Denmark (that's us...). It is hormone free, antibiotic free etc. etc.
Don't believe everything you read, especially in the Marxist Times? We get a newspaper here in the mail every so often entitled "The Citizen" and it's full of the same misguided propaganda.
The US is only just getting it's beef exports to Japan up and running again after cases of BSE, and Canada has been unable to export beef to the US for the same reason.
I certainly don't see this as some global conspiracy to erode farmer's rights- it's just common sense!
