The government has a long history of using tracking technology to ascertain our whereabouts, our habits, and even our preferences. From cellphones and cars to snow plows and garbage trucks, governments seemingly want to track anything that moves—or moos.

The USDA recently finalized a rule—set to go into effect in a few months—that will require all cattle and bison being moved across state lines to be tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. RFID technology uses radio frequency waves to transmit and collect data by way of a system of electronic tags and scanners. The technology is best viewed as a type of electronic or remote barcode, in which scanners can read an RFID chip anywhere from a few meters away to around 100 meters away. In some ways analogous to a shorter-range GPS system, RFID can track geographic location and also operate as a system of data collection and storage.

In the context of livestock, a quick scan of an RFID tag can pull up information like a cow's date of birth, weight, vaccine records, ownership history, what farms it has been to, and what movements it has made. The USDA is justifying its RFID mandate on public health grounds, claiming that it can help trace and eradicate potential disease outbreaks among livestock, such as mad cow disease or hoof-and-mouth disease. 

While plausible at first blush, it is far from clear that the mandate will accomplish its intended objective, and it is very clear that it will disproportionately hurt small and independent ranchers and cattle farmers.

For one thing, most ranchers already want to be able to identify their cattle and have used physical metal tags for years to do so. Electronic RFID tags are twice as expensive as traditional metal tags and also require an upfront investment in scanners and software, making the switch cost-prohibitive for many small farms. Farmers also complain that electronic tags are harder to identify visually from a distance, which matters during cattle drives and other large and quick-paced movements of livestock. Most farmers that use electronic tags therefore also still tag their animals with traditional physical tags, necessitating a double-investment in two types of tags.

There's also the issue of tag retention. "I've talked to many people who have used these RFID tags and their cows have lost 50 percent after five years," Ken Fox, a South Dakota cow farmer and chair of R-CALF USA's Animal Identification Committee, told Wisconsin State Farmer. "By year nine or ten only 14 percent of the tags were left; and our beef cows can be with us for 15 to 20 years, so that's a serious concern." Fox also notes that the RFID scanners often need to be replaced every four or five years.

Fox points out that not all livestock operations are created equal. For dairy farmers who keep their livestock penned up, frequent replacing of tags is more logistically feasible, if still expensive. But for cattle ranchers, tag replacement can be entirely impracticable. "That just doesn't work when we've got cattle on 10,000 or 30,000 acres of range land and we handle those cattle maybe twice a year," said Fox. "If they lose those tags, how are we going to know who those cattle are?" Amish farmers have also opposed electronic tagging on moral grounds given their opposition to technology.

Large cattle operations can afford to double-tag their livestock with physical and electronic tags, and in fact, many have already done so voluntarily—which means the mandate's burden will fall heaviest on small and medium-sized farms and ranches. The USDA rule also favors large cattle operations more directly, including allowing them to use so-called "group identification" for livestock herds of a certain size and continuity.

"The new rule also provides for large-scale cattle operations to use one ID per group of a certain size, instead of one ID per animal," writes Remington Kesten in a blog post for David's Pasture, a small-scale cattle operation in Missouri. "This means that the smaller farms will actually incur more cost per animal once the mandate takes effect, than the big players will." 

Worse yet, this group identification actually undercuts the USDA's entire disease-traceability rationale for mandated electronic tagging. "This intentional loophole also reduces the traceability for large farms and exporters, contradicting the USDA's primary reason for mandating RFID Ear Tags in the first place," notes Kesten.

The rule also fails on its own terms. While supporters point to the 2003 mad cow disease outbreak in Washington state as an example of a situation where electronic tagging could have allowed for quicker identification of where the disease originated, it's worth noting that the government was still able to track the original diseased cow back to its birthplace farm in Canada within 13 days.

It's also worth recognizing that livestock disease outbreaks are exceedingly rare in the United States. An article in Lancaster Farming, which takes a generally favorable bent toward the USDA mandate, notes that hoof-and-mouth disease was last found in America in 1929. Farmers such as Fox have also highlighted the successful combatting of brucellosis in the United States, which was accomplished without electronic tagging. 

If anything, it is large-scale commercial farms that are most responsible for disease outbreaks. "There is no data in over a decade showing that food borne illnesses have resulted from disease on small farms," writes Kesten. "All major disease outbreaks in recent years have occurred on large farms." In other words, small and independent ranchers are bearing the brunt of a new rule in the name of fixing a problem that they have nothing to do with.

Finally, the USDA rule creates significant data privacy concerns. RFID tags cannot distinguish between scanners—which are portable and easily carried in hand—so potentially anyone with a scanner could access the data contained in each tag. Ominously, the USDA rule opts to use the term electronic identification tags instead of the RFID acronym, although for now RFID tags are the only technology approved by the USDA for livestock tagging. 

This flexible language means that USDA is explicitly leaving the door open to even more comprehensive tracking technology. This could come in the form of "active" RFID tags (instead of "passive" ones as currently contemplated) that have a greater range of readability or even GPS tracking of cows via satellites.

One small beacon of hope for American ranchers is that Congress appears to finally be waking up to the USDA's overreach. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the USDA from implementing any rule that mandates electronic tagging technology for cattle and bison.

The USDA is attempting to find a solution for a problem that has already been largely addressed through current practices. 

Fox puts it more colorfully: "Someone told me this story—NASA spent millions trying to develop a pen that could work in sub-zero temperatures and zero gravity. The Russians just used a pencil."

The post The Government Wants To Track Your Steak appeared first on Reason.com.

Arthur Erickson discovered drones during his first year at college studying aerospace engineering. He immediately thought the sky was the limit for how the machines could be used, but it took years of hard work and some nimble decisions to turn that enthusiasm into a successful startup.

Today, Erickson is the CEO of Houston-based Hylio, a company that builds crop-spraying drones for farmers. Launched in 2015, the company has its own factory and employs more than 40 people.

Arthur Erickson

Occupation:

Aerospace engineer and founder, Hylio

Location:

Houston

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, from the University of Texas at Austin

Erickson founded Hylio with classmates while they were attending the University of Texas at Austin. They were eager to quit college and launch their business, which he admits was a little presumptuous.

“We were like, ‘Screw all the school stuff—drones are the future,’” Erickson says. “I already thought I had all the requisite technical skills and had learned enough after six months of school, which obviously was arrogant.”

His parents convinced him to finish college, but Erickson and the other cofounders spent all their spare time building a multipurpose drone from off-the-shelf components and parts they made using their university’s 3D printers and laser cutters.

By the time he graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, the group’s prototype was complete, and they began hunting for customers. The next three years were a wild ride of testing their drones in Costa Rica and other countries across Central America.

A grocery delivery service

A promotional video about the company that Erickson posted on Instagram led to the first customer, the now-defunct Costa Rican food and grocery delivery startup GoPato. The company wanted to use the drones to make deliveries in the capital, San José, but rather than purchase the machines, GoPato offered to pay for the founders’ meals and lodging and give them a percentage of delivery fees collected.

For the next nine months, Hylio’s team spent their days sending their drones on deliveries and their nights troubleshooting problems in a makeshift workshop in their shared living room.

“We had a lot of sleepless nights,” Erickson says. “It was a trial by fire, and we learned a lot.”

One lesson was the need to build in redundant pieces of key hardware, particularly the GPS unit. “When you have a drone crash in the middle of a Costa Rican suburb, the importance of redundancy really hits home,” Erickson says.

“Drones are great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

The small cut of delivery fees Hylio received wasn’t covering costs, Erickson says, so eventually the founders parted ways with GoPato. Meanwhile, they had been looking for new business opportunities in Costa Rica. They learned from local farmers that the terrain was too rugged for tractors, so most sprayed crops by hand. This was both grueling and hazardous because it brought the farmers into close proximity to the pesticides.

The Hylio team realized its drones could do this type of work faster and more safely. They designed a spray system and made some software tweaks, and by 2018 the company began offering crop-spraying services, Erickson says. The company expanded its business to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, starting with just a pair of drones but eventually operating three spraying teams of four drones each.

The work was tough, Erickson says, but the experience helped the team refine their technology, working out which sensors operated best in the alternately dusty and moist conditions found on farms. Even more important, by the end of 2019 they were finally turning a profit.

Drones are cheaper than tractors

In hindsight, agriculture was an obvious market, Erickson says, even in the United States, where spraying with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers is typically done using large tractors. These tractors can cost up to half a million dollars to purchase and about US $7 a hectare to operate.

A pair of Hylio’s drones cost a fifth of that, Erickson says, and operating them costs about a quarter of the price. The company’s drones also fly autonomously; an operator simply marks GPS waypoints on a map to program the drone where to spray and then sits back and lets it do the job. In this way, one person can oversee multiple drones working at once, covering more fields than a single tractor could.

Arthur Erickson inspects the company’s largest spray drone, the AG-272. It can cover thousands of hectares per day.Hylio

Convincing farmers to use drones instead of tractors was tough, Erickson says. Farmers tend to be conservative and are wary of technology companies that promise too much.

“Farmers are used to people coming around every few years with some newfangled idea, like a laser that’s going to kill all their weeds or some miracle chemical,” he says.

In 2020, Hylio opened a factory in Houston and started selling drones to American farmers. The first time Hylio exhibited its machines at an agricultural trade show, Erickson says, a customer purchased one on the spot.

“It was pretty exciting,” he says. “It was a really good feeling to find out that our product was polished enough, and the pitch was attractive enough, to immediately get customers.”

Today, selling farmers on the benefits of drones is a big part of Erickson’s job. But he’s still involved in product development, and his daily meetings with the sales team have become an invaluable source of customer feedback. “They inform a lot of the features that we add to the products,” he says.

He’s currently leading development of a new type of drone—a scout—designed to quickly inspect fields for pest infestations or poor growth or to assess crop yields. But these days his job is more about managing his team of engineers than about doing hands-on engineering himself. “I’m more of a translator between the engineers and the market needs,” he says.

Focus on users’ needs

Erickson advises other founders of startups not to get too caught up in the excitement of building cutting-edge technology, because you can lose sight of what the user actually needs.

“I’ve become a big proponent of not trying to outsmart the customers,” he says. “They tell us what their pain points are and what they want to see in the product. Don’t overengineer it. Always check with the end users that what you’re building is going to be useful.”

Working with drones forces you to become a generalist, Erickson says. You need a basic understanding of structural mechanics and aerodynamics to build something airworthy. But you also need to be comfortable working with sensors, communications systems, and power electronics, not to mention the software used to control and navigate the vehicles.

Erickson advises students who want to get into the field to take courses in mechatronics, which provide a good blend of mechanical and electrical engineering. Deep knowledge of the individual parts is generally not as important as understanding how to fit all the pieces together to create a system that works well as a whole.

And if you’re a tinkerer like he is, Erickson says, there are few better ways to hone your engineering skills than building a drone. “It’s a cheap, fast way to get something up in the air,” he says. “They’re great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Careers: Arthur Erickson.”

America's most insane occupational licensing law is about to get a whole lot better.

Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in an arrangement. Going forward, obtaining a florist license will require only the payment of a fee to the state.

The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle with a unanimous vote in the state House on Wednesday. Landry, a Republican who has supported other licensing reforms, is expected to sign it.

Requiring any sort of government permission slip before someone can work as a florist is obviously ridiculous, and Louisiana's florist-testing regime was a uniquely perverse and protectionist scheme. This week's passage of state Rep. Mike Bayham's (R–Chalmette) reform bill is the culmination of a two-decade battle to eliminate it.

That effort began in the early 2000s, when the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit challenging the florist licensing law. One of the plaintiffs in that case, a woman named Sandy Meadows, had been fired from her job at a Baton Rogue grocery store when state inspectors discovered she had been arranging flowers without the proper license. She tragically died, unemployed and in poverty, before the case could be heard.

Several subsequent lawsuits and legislative efforts have failed to kill the florist licensing law, although Louisiana lawmakers did adopt changes in 2012 that put an end to the practical portion of the licensing exam. Yes, before that, would-be florists were not only quizzed on their knowledge of the profession but also on their subjective skills at arranging flowers. The judges for the exam, naturally, were already-licensed florists.

Even after the exam was pared back to being only a written test, the requirements were still quite onerous, Sarah Harbison, general counsel for the Pelican Institute, a free market think tank that supported the reform bill, told Reason this week. The test would be offered only a few times a year, and would-be licensees had to travel to Baton Rouge to take it in person.

The arguments for maintaining the florist license strain credibility. During a Louisiana Senate hearing on the reform bill earlier this month, Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain fretted about the risk of "pest and disease problems" if the licensing requirement was removed. Louisiana does not require a license to sell cut flowers—which would presumably carry the same, truly terrifying risks—but does require a license if you want to arrange different types of flowers into a bouquet. And if Louisiana is protecting the public from the danger of unlicensed floristry, why isn't there mass chaos in the 49 other states where florists can work without first passing a government-issued test?

"This will lead to greater sales of flowers. This will help people get jobs. This will expand opportunities for people to sell flowers, and this will get rid of a needless regulation," Bayham said last month when the House first approved his bill.

Good riddance to Louisiana's absurd florist licensing exams. But this week's reforms do leave one dilemma: What will be America's worst licensing law now?

The post Louisiana Finally Fixes America's Dumbest Licensing Requirement appeared first on Reason.com.

American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry.

Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to fully implement it. In the past month, more than 30 leading conservative organizations and individuals, hundreds of state and local chambers of commerce, and the U.S. agricultural sector have pleaded with the EPA to help stop this piece of extremism from escaping one coastal state.

Railroads may not be something most Americans, whose attention is on their own cars and roads, think about often. But rail is the most basic infrastructure of interstate commerce, accounting for around 40 percent of long-distance ton-miles. It's also fairly clean, accounting for less than 1 percent of total U.S. emissions. Private companies, like Union Pacific in the West or CSX in the East, pay for their infrastructure and equipment. These facts haven't stopped the regulatory power grab.

Most importantly, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation would have all freight trains operate in zero-emission configuration by 2035. At the end of the decade, the state is mandating the retirement of diesel locomotives 23 years or older, despite typically useful lives of over 40 years. Starting in 2030, new passenger locomotives must operate with zero emissions, with new engines for long-haul freight trains following by 2035. It limits locomotive idling and increases reporting requirements.

Given the interstate nature of railway operations, California needs the EPA to grant a waiver. If the agency agrees, the policy will inevitably affect the entire continental United States.

The kicker is that no technology exists today to enable railroads to comply with California's diktat, rendering the whole exercise fanciful at best.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board explained last November that while Wabtec Corp. has introduced a pioneering advance in rail technology with the launch of the world's first battery-powered locomotive, the dream of a freight train fully powered by batteries remains elusive. The challenges of substituting diesel with batteries—primarily due to batteries' substantial weight and volume—make it an impractical solution for long-haul trains. Additionally, the risk of battery overheating and potential explosions, which can emit harmful gases, is a significant safety concern. As the editorial noted, "Even if the technology for zero-emission locomotives eventually arrives, railroads will have to test them over many years to guarantee their safety."

The cost-benefit analysis is woefully unfavorable to the forced displacement of diesel locomotives. To "help" the transition, beginning in 2026, CARB will force all railroads operating in California to deposit dollars into an escrow account managed by the state and frozen for the explicit pursuit of the green agenda. For large railroads, this figure will be a staggering $1.6 billion per year, whereas some smaller railroads will pay up to $5 million.

Many of these smaller companies have signaled that they will simply go out of business. For the large railroads, the requirement will lock up about 20 percent of annual spending, money typically used for maintenance and safety improvements.

Transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions, yet railroads' contribution amounts to not much more than a rounding error. The industry cites its efficiency improvements over time, allowing railroads today to move a ton of freight more than 500 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Its expensive machines, which last between 30 to 50 years and are retrofitted throughout their life cycles, are about 75 percent more efficient than long-haul trucks that carry a comparative amount of freight.

As Patricia Patnode of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which signed the aforementioned letter to the EPA, recently remarked, "Rather than abolish diesel trains, CARB should stand in awe of these marvels of energy-efficient transportation."

President Joe Biden talks a lot about trains, but his actions since taking office have consistently punished the private companies we should value far more than state-supported Amtrak. In this case, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and the White House need not think too hard. They should wait for reality to catch up before imposing on the rest of us one state's demands and ambitions.

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