A federal court in Rapid City, South Dakota, has been asked to strike down the first US rule requiring electronically readable eartags on cattle moving between states. Cross-motions for summary judgment in Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America et al. v. USDA, Case No. 5:24-cv-05085, are listed for 1:30pm on 18 November 2026 in Courtroom 2 of the US District Court for the District of South Dakota, Western Division, before Judge Eric C. Schulte. It is a motion hearing, not a trial, and turns on the legal arguments and the existing administrative record.
R-CALF USA, a membership organisation representing US cattle producers, brought the case with the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance and ranchers Kenny and Roxie Fox and Rick and Theresa Fox. Their lawyers are the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a public-interest group that litigates against federal agency action. The defendants are the USDA, Secretary Brooke L. Rollins, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which runs federal animal disease traceability, and APHIS Administrator Michael Watson. The suit, filed on 30 October 2024, six days before the rule took effect, argues under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that the rule is arbitrary and capricious.
What the 2024 rule changed
The rule is “Use of Electronic Identification Eartags as Official Identification in Cattle and Bison”, 89 FR 39540, published on 9 May 2024 and effective from 5 November 2024. It strips visual-only eartags of official identification status for covered interstate movements, so tags applied from that date must be readable both electronically and visually. Per KMZU’s reporting, it covers sexually intact cattle and bison aged 18 months and older, all dairy cattle, and rodeo or exhibition animals of any age. APHIS conservatively put the scale at 11 million cattle and bison tagged with visual official identification each year, “approximately 11 percent to 12 percent” of the domestic inventory.
Every approved electronic identification (EID) eartag carries a 15-digit Animal Identification Number (AIN), the official individual-animal number, beginning 840003, in which 840 is the United States country code. Uncoded 900-series numbers are not acceptable for US-born animals. That numbering sits behind most of the US schemes in our animal tagging coverage.
The rule names no frequency, but every approved tag is low frequency
One detail is widely misread: the rule mandates no RFID frequency and does not approve UHF. Asked whether high frequency or low frequency tags would be required or recommended, APHIS answered that “We are neither requiring nor recommending any one type of EID eartag over another.” Neutrality, it says, “will allow APHIS to adapt to technological developments”. Commenters pressed for “UHF, biometric, Bluetooth, and satellite geolocation” and APHIS endorsed none of them.
Practice is far narrower. The regulatory impact analysis assessed “the types of EID eartags that are currently approved for use, which include FDX and HDX RFID tags”, and “EID technology available and approved for use today, which is currently limited to RFID”. FDX and HDX are the two signalling modes defined for animal transponders in ISO 11784 and ISO 11785, both on a 134.2 kHz low frequency carrier: FDX-B transmits while the reader field is switched on, HDX charges from the field and replies in a gap in it. The rule sets criteria for “low-frequency devices” and accepts testing equivalent to that of the International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR), the ISO-appointed registration authority for manufacturer codes, whose conformance regime is ISO 24631. The regulation is therefore frequency-agnostic on paper while the approved list is entirely low frequency: APHIS can add UHF later without a new rulemaking, and meanwhile a producer buying official EID eartags is buying 134.2 kHz hardware.
A mandate to tag, without a mandate to read
R-CALF’s sharpest practical argument is that the rule requires an electronic identifier but nothing capable of reading it, and the Federal Register text concedes as much: the rule “does not require the use of infrastructure, such as readers, because tags are required to have a visual component.”
R-CALF CEO Bill Bullard drew out what that means in a handling facility in a commentary published on 15 October 2026. USDA’s justification is that handwritten numbers and inaccessible paper records delay disease tracing, yet the rule still lets ranchers and veterinarians read an electronic tag by eye, write the number down by hand and keep it on paper. “Electronic readers and electronic recordkeeping are optional,” he said. A producer can be made to buy a dearer tag and then use it exactly as they used the cheaper one it replaced. Who ends up holding a reader is not a US-only question: in October 2026 we covered a scheme putting low frequency RFID boluses in the rumen of 300,000 cattle in Burkina Faso against livestock theft.
R-CALF’s reply brief goes further: scanning an animal later cannot correct a number copied down wrongly when it was vaccinated or sold, and no scanner recovers paper records that were never kept. NCLA calls the rule internally inconsistent, and so arbitrary and capricious, for holding that EID tags are needed to cut transcription errors while letting them be used exactly like the visual-only tags they replace.
“USDA’s EID eartag mandate is a costly solution in search of a nonexistent problem,” said Kara Rollins, Senior Litigation Counsel at NCLA, when the group moved for summary judgment on 5 March 2026. “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.” Colleague John Vecchione, also Senior Litigation Counsel, said: “The authority behind this regulation is ‘all hat and no cattle.'”
The money in dispute
APHIS costed the change at “approximately $26.1 million, assuming no Federal funding is provided”, or “an average cost of $30.45 per cattle or bison operation each year”. Against the metal NUES tags being displaced, the rule compares $3.3 million a year with $29.3 million. APHIS has supplied official tags free of charge, EID tags since 2020, and intends to keep funding them while funding lasts, but cannot commit to multi-year funding. R-CALF says free tags neither erase money already spent nor guarantee future appropriations, and that Kenny and Roxie Fox paid $3.50 per electronic tag, above USDA’s highest estimated average price.
The rest of the ranchers’ case
Bullard’s commentary adds further lines of attack, all of them R-CALF’s characterisation rather than settled fact. Average tracing times, it says, had already fallen below a previously identified 48-hour benchmark before the mandate. It asks how a rule reaching roughly 11 to 12 percent of the national inventory can suffice when the rule itself says full preparedness for a high-risk foreign animal disease incursion would need “an estimated 70 percent of each species/sector” to be traceable. It calls USDA inconsistent for still permitting brands while conceding their limits for individual animals, and says the agency never weighed the cheaper alternative of readability standards for visual tags, having imposed larger fonts and colour contrast on electronic ones. R-CALF also raises privacy and data security concerns over USDA’s data collection. It asks the court to set the rule aside and restore producers’ choice of tag.
USDA’s position, and how the case got here
USDA filed its reply brief on 16 October 2026, the day it was due, arguing electronic identification will help animal health officials retrace the steps of infected cattle and contain disease. It accuses R-CALF of arguing both that the rule is too intrusive and that it does not go far enough. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association supported the rule when it was adopted.
Judge Schulte rejected USDA’s standing challenge on 30 September 2025, finding the individual ranchers had adequately alleged injuries, and sent the core APA claim to summary judgment while dismissing a separate statutory-authority claim without prejudice. Settlement talks paused the case in June 2026 and produced nothing. Bullard said R-CALF had hoped the Trump administration would see the Biden-era mandate as burdensome and unnecessary. “We saw no evidence it did,” he said. “Our members remain steadfastly opposed to this rule.”
R-CALF has forced a retreat on this ground once already. It sued over an earlier USDA RFID mandate on 4 October 2019, USDA withdrew that mandate on 25 October 2019, inside three weeks, and by February 2020 the court was satisfied the withdrawal was complete. The notice-and-comment rulemaking that followed produced the 2024 rule. Whichever way the APA claim goes, the technical specification of US official EID eartags sits in the APHIS approved device list rather than in the regulation, so it can change without a new rule.
