WASHINGTON, D.C. – The New Civil Liberties Alliance has asked the U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota for summary judgment in R-CALF USA, et al. v. USDA.

Representing ranchers, farmers, and livestock producers, NCLA urges the court to vacate a rule promulgated by USDA and its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) that requires electronic identification (EID) eartags for certain cattle and bison transported across state lines, in place of long-used visual tags. 

The court is asked to end the expensive mandate that USDA instituted in 2024 to replace an already efficient means of cattle identification without explaining why the expensive change is needed nor how it will help reduce animal disease.

After previously agreeing that visual-only eartags were effective in tracing disease in cattle and bison and letting producers choose between visual-only and electronically readable options, USDA changed its mind with this 2024 rule, according to R-CALF USA.

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The organization points out USDA now says EID tags and electronic records are significantly better for disease tracing, without giving any reasoning or data to support that claim. USDA has not done anything to address alleged problems it claims to have found with visual tag-based tracing.

The current rule does not require producers to buy or use electronic eartag readers, so they use the EID tags to track cattle the same way they previously used the far less expensive visual-only tags. This means American ranchers are simply paying more to do what they have done for decades to effectively track and prevent livestock disease.

The EID rule says EID eartags are necessary to reduce transcription errors in livestock tracking records due to “human error,” but it also permits EID eartags to be used the same way as visual-only tags. This sort of internal inconsistency is arbitrary and capricious. Having never reasonably justified the EID tag mandate in the first place, USDA also failed to consider the alternative of requiring readability standards for visual-only tags instead. Each of these problems violates the Administrative Procedure Act, according to R-CALF USA.

“USDA’s EID eartag mandate is a costly solution in search of a nonexistent problem,” said Kara Rollins, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA. “America’s ranchers and farmers have long used visual-only identification for disease tracing, and this Rule does not change that option. It just makes that process much more expensive.”