Know Your Beef

As agricultural prices continue to decline, more and more people are seeking custom niches. Now the entire state of South Dakota is backing their certified beef, as described in this WPost article:

"Enlisting its police and administrative authority, the state guarantees consumers who buy South Dakota Certified Beef that they will be partaking of a computer-tracked cow that was born, fed and butchered inside state borders, using exacting standards of nutrition, with a humane upbringing and walled off from all possible contact with mad cow disease.

After a consumer takes home the beef, he or she can use the Internet to find a photograph of the South Dakota family ranch where it came from. And if a rancher or a butcher cheats in caring for cows under the new rules, the state is ready and willing to charge him with a felony and send him to prison for two years."

The idea may sound good, but there's some problems with it.

• First, as described here, USDA is implementing a national animal ID system. So anyone, state, or individual, could piggyback on the system to offer similar guarantees with little or no added investment.
• Second, while I've invested in Whole Foods because I think organic-style marketing is only going to grow, I'm not sure how much of a premium South Dakota could command. (What they really need, about a year or so from now, is a really major mad cow problem.)
• Third, the logical extrapolation is using the Internet to see, not the ranch, but the actual steer being raised. But that may be more reality than city types really want to deal with. (Michael Pollan had an article in the NYTimes magazine a couple years ago where he bought a calf and had it raised, so he could write about the process. My memory is he wasn't happy about eating it.)