By JOHN DOBBERSTEIN World Staff Writer
8/12/2006
Creekstone Farms, which wants to test all its animals, is at odds with the USDA.
ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. -- After another futile visit to the nation's capital, John Stewart faced a tough decision.
Give up, or let the courts decide.
So Stewart, founder and CEO of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to test every animal slaughtered at his plant for mad cow disease.
The lawsuit has placed Creekstone -- a cutting-edge meat packer 25 miles north of Ponca City -- in the national spotlight. Stewart has appeared on National Public Radio to plead his case. Other media have interviewed him, and interest groups and lawmakers have joined the fray with their opinions.
The USDA says it has legal jurisdiction over mad cow testing. But Stewart says the agency isn't taking the mad cow threat seriously enough.
In fact, Stewart said he plans to form a worldwide panel of experts this year to study the disease and make judgments about its risks and prevalence in the U.S. He said he would share the results with the USDA.
"Whether the government does anything about it or not, that's their choice," Stewart said in an interview. "We want to plan our direction and strategy
on facts we get from world experts, not based on what the USDA is telling us, because I think the USDA's information is too editorialized."
Mad cow is also called BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The disease killed 150 people in England during an outbreak in the 1990s and has been found in a handful of countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
People can develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a highly fatal brain disorder, by eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease. The first U.S. case of mad cow was found in 2003 in a cow imported from Canada, prompting nearly 60 countries to halt imports of American beef.
The USDA has been at odds with Stewart since 2004, when he first started asking to perform his own BSE testing.
The agency has tested nearly 800,000 animals in the past two years and found only two cases of BSE -- in June 2005 in Texas, and last March in Alabama.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns proclaimed in July that the nation's beef supply was safe. Then he announced plans to cut the USDA's BSE testing to 40,000 animals per year -- less than 1 percent of the 35 million cattle slaughtered annually.
That rate is far below that of most developed countries who test for BSE but higher than standards set by the World Organization for Animal Health.
"There is no significant BSE problem in the United States. And after all of this surveillance, I am able to say there never was," Johanns told reporters last month. "Those who are trying to convince their consumers that universal testing or 100 percent testing somehow solves the problem really are misleading."
Stewart's battle with the USDA stems from 2003, when he was invited to speak about the international beef trade at a USDA conference. On Dec. 23 of that year -- two months before the speech -- the first U.S. case of BSE was found in Washington state, in a cow imported from Canada.
When Stewart spoke -- in front of a throng of reporters and USDA officials -- he announced plans for Creekstone to test every animal slaughtered at its plant.
At the time, Stewart said, he viewed his company's policy as a tool to reassure customers. Instead, it created an uproar.
The next morning, a senior USDA veterinarian announced that her agency had sole authority to control the sale and use of BSE tests. The agency said its authority comes from the Virus Serum Toxins Act, passed in 1913 to stop scam artists from making bogus serums to cure hog cholera.
Jim Rogers, a spokesman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the act doesn't stop Creekstone from performing BSE tests, but it forbids the sale of the test kits to unapproved parties.
The foreign ban on U.S. beef hit Creekstone hard. A third of the plant's sales were overseas, and 70 percent of those sales were wrapped up in Japan, the largest U.S. beef customer at the time.
With Japan out of the picture, the company's lucrative market for less desirable beef cuts -- like short ribs, tongue, skirt steak and strip loin -- disappeared. Creekstone had to cut production and lay off 150 people.
Angry and frustrated, Stewart met five times in 2004 with the staff of then-Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman. He eventually was told that testing all of Creekstone's animals was "not scientifically warranted" and he could not proceed.
Stewart was rebuffed again during a face-to-face meeting with Johanns in 2005.
One problem with Stewart's idea, Rogers said, is the possibility of false positives. If a beef plant publicly reported a BSE case, trade routes might close before the USDA could confirm the results.
"If a company says their meat is BSE-free, it doesn't mean anything because the incubation time is so long -- it doesn't show up except in older animals," Rogers said.
But Stewart believes private testing means plenty. Creekstone has lost more than $100 million since late 2003, he said. His company spent $500,000 in 2004 to build a state-of-the-art BSE testing lab, and several employees traveled to France for training.
Creekstone's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., derided the USDA's legal arguments against voluntary testing as "implausible, illogical, inconsistent and counterintuitive."
The lawsuit challenges the UDSA's authority to block Creekstone from obtaining the test kits and asks Judge James Robertson to allow private companies to voluntarily test all animals for BSE. The lawsuit also requests that the USDA be appointed to oversee surveillance efforts of private plants.
The testing would cost Creekstone about $6 million a year, or $20 per animal.
The USDA hasn't formally responded to the suit. Requests for comment were referred by Johanns' press office to Rogers, who said he couldn't comment on pending litigation.
Creekstone's shipments of beef to Japan resumed last week but are nowhere near 2003 levels. Teams of Japanese inspectors spent two days at Creekstone in May, poring over records and touring the 500,000-square-foot plant.
The road ahead for the U.S. beef industry is tough, Stewart said, especially in Asia.
Beef consumption in Japan has shrunk from 11.5 pounds per person each year to 7 pounds, and Australia's market share in Japan more than doubled while U.S. beef was banned.
Additionally, Stewart said experts are predicting a beef surplus of 1 billion pounds in the U.S. by 2008, making international markets even more critical.
Voluntary testing, he said, would give producers a marketing weapon in a turbulent world economy.
"If we were BSE testing, we wouldn't have to go through any of this," Stewart said. "Japanese consumers would be happy. We would have record exports to Japan and Korea, higher cattle prices for ranchers, and we would be attacking the Australians head on.
"Tell me something bad about BSE testing, other than the fact the government doesn't want us doing it."
8/12/2006
Creekstone Farms, which wants to test all its animals, is at odds with the USDA.
ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. -- After another futile visit to the nation's capital, John Stewart faced a tough decision.
Give up, or let the courts decide.
So Stewart, founder and CEO of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to test every animal slaughtered at his plant for mad cow disease.
The lawsuit has placed Creekstone -- a cutting-edge meat packer 25 miles north of Ponca City -- in the national spotlight. Stewart has appeared on National Public Radio to plead his case. Other media have interviewed him, and interest groups and lawmakers have joined the fray with their opinions.
The USDA says it has legal jurisdiction over mad cow testing. But Stewart says the agency isn't taking the mad cow threat seriously enough.
In fact, Stewart said he plans to form a worldwide panel of experts this year to study the disease and make judgments about its risks and prevalence in the U.S. He said he would share the results with the USDA.
"Whether the government does anything about it or not, that's their choice," Stewart said in an interview. "We want to plan our direction and strategy
on facts we get from world experts, not based on what the USDA is telling us, because I think the USDA's information is too editorialized."
Mad cow is also called BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The disease killed 150 people in England during an outbreak in the 1990s and has been found in a handful of countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
People can develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a highly fatal brain disorder, by eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease. The first U.S. case of mad cow was found in 2003 in a cow imported from Canada, prompting nearly 60 countries to halt imports of American beef.
The USDA has been at odds with Stewart since 2004, when he first started asking to perform his own BSE testing.
The agency has tested nearly 800,000 animals in the past two years and found only two cases of BSE -- in June 2005 in Texas, and last March in Alabama.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns proclaimed in July that the nation's beef supply was safe. Then he announced plans to cut the USDA's BSE testing to 40,000 animals per year -- less than 1 percent of the 35 million cattle slaughtered annually.
That rate is far below that of most developed countries who test for BSE but higher than standards set by the World Organization for Animal Health.
"There is no significant BSE problem in the United States. And after all of this surveillance, I am able to say there never was," Johanns told reporters last month. "Those who are trying to convince their consumers that universal testing or 100 percent testing somehow solves the problem really are misleading."
Stewart's battle with the USDA stems from 2003, when he was invited to speak about the international beef trade at a USDA conference. On Dec. 23 of that year -- two months before the speech -- the first U.S. case of BSE was found in Washington state, in a cow imported from Canada.
When Stewart spoke -- in front of a throng of reporters and USDA officials -- he announced plans for Creekstone to test every animal slaughtered at its plant.
At the time, Stewart said, he viewed his company's policy as a tool to reassure customers. Instead, it created an uproar.
The next morning, a senior USDA veterinarian announced that her agency had sole authority to control the sale and use of BSE tests. The agency said its authority comes from the Virus Serum Toxins Act, passed in 1913 to stop scam artists from making bogus serums to cure hog cholera.
Jim Rogers, a spokesman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the act doesn't stop Creekstone from performing BSE tests, but it forbids the sale of the test kits to unapproved parties.
The foreign ban on U.S. beef hit Creekstone hard. A third of the plant's sales were overseas, and 70 percent of those sales were wrapped up in Japan, the largest U.S. beef customer at the time.
With Japan out of the picture, the company's lucrative market for less desirable beef cuts -- like short ribs, tongue, skirt steak and strip loin -- disappeared. Creekstone had to cut production and lay off 150 people.
Angry and frustrated, Stewart met five times in 2004 with the staff of then-Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman. He eventually was told that testing all of Creekstone's animals was "not scientifically warranted" and he could not proceed.
Stewart was rebuffed again during a face-to-face meeting with Johanns in 2005.
One problem with Stewart's idea, Rogers said, is the possibility of false positives. If a beef plant publicly reported a BSE case, trade routes might close before the USDA could confirm the results.
"If a company says their meat is BSE-free, it doesn't mean anything because the incubation time is so long -- it doesn't show up except in older animals," Rogers said.
But Stewart believes private testing means plenty. Creekstone has lost more than $100 million since late 2003, he said. His company spent $500,000 in 2004 to build a state-of-the-art BSE testing lab, and several employees traveled to France for training.
Creekstone's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., derided the USDA's legal arguments against voluntary testing as "implausible, illogical, inconsistent and counterintuitive."
The lawsuit challenges the UDSA's authority to block Creekstone from obtaining the test kits and asks Judge James Robertson to allow private companies to voluntarily test all animals for BSE. The lawsuit also requests that the USDA be appointed to oversee surveillance efforts of private plants.
The testing would cost Creekstone about $6 million a year, or $20 per animal.
The USDA hasn't formally responded to the suit. Requests for comment were referred by Johanns' press office to Rogers, who said he couldn't comment on pending litigation.
Creekstone's shipments of beef to Japan resumed last week but are nowhere near 2003 levels. Teams of Japanese inspectors spent two days at Creekstone in May, poring over records and touring the 500,000-square-foot plant.
The road ahead for the U.S. beef industry is tough, Stewart said, especially in Asia.
Beef consumption in Japan has shrunk from 11.5 pounds per person each year to 7 pounds, and Australia's market share in Japan more than doubled while U.S. beef was banned.
Additionally, Stewart said experts are predicting a beef surplus of 1 billion pounds in the U.S. by 2008, making international markets even more critical.
Voluntary testing, he said, would give producers a marketing weapon in a turbulent world economy.
"If we were BSE testing, we wouldn't have to go through any of this," Stewart said. "Japanese consumers would be happy. We would have record exports to Japan and Korea, higher cattle prices for ranchers, and we would be attacking the Australians head on.
"Tell me something bad about BSE testing, other than the fact the government doesn't want us doing it."