The left-leaning U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, an urban court with no discernible expertise in agriculture, has opened up all the major databases of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to private data mills, breaching the privacy of tens of thousands of farmers. The data mills mine the data to sell things to farmers and build sales leads for thousands of marketing businesses.
The data is collected in confidential filings farmers make to apply for government programs and loans. It is no different than filing a personal financial statement with a bank to obtain a loan. That information is not made public, and the government should be no different.
The court ruling comes at a particularly ackward and sensitive time for USDA's voluntary Animal Identification program, which urges farmers and ranchers to register their animals so they can be traced from birth to slaughter, when a disease such as BSE breaks out or a public health scare like E. coli needs to be rooted out.
Farm organizations fought hard to keep Animal I.D. voluntary, rather than another government mandate. This court ruling will certainly make producers think twice about whether to register their animals.
There are numerous legal precedents for keeping private proprietary information private and confidential. Competitve businesses can gain mightily for their own profit if they can find out what the competition is doing. This court ruling allows that in agriculture, and provides a definite basis for the ruling to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and overturned.
We can only hope that the more free enterprise-oriented justices of the Supreme Court see the validity of private and confidential data, unlike their brethren on the DC Court of Appeals.
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