WHAT IS REALLY REQUIRED FOR NAIS?
NAIS is a voluntary program as of January 18, 2009. If you wish to participate in the NAIS program you would first need to Register your Premises. You can do this through your state department of agriculture or tribal administrator. More information can be found at the link provided above. You would then purchase RFID tags to attach to the animals on your premises. We recommend the USDA 840 tags for this purpose because either the Tag Manufacturer or Tag Reseller that you purchase the 840 tags from will take care of assigning your RFID tag numbers to your Premises ID number in the NAIS database. The USDA 840 tags are now very comparable in price to the basic RFID tags. At this point the NAIS has basically served it’s purpose and from there, to fully utilize the advantages of having your animals identified with an 840 tag, you would probably want to align your program with a third-party verifier type program hosted by your state or cattle association such as the South Dakota Certified E
