The costs of becoming NAIS compliant for a U.S. beef producer were found to be a minimum of $2.08 a head for large producers and as much as $17.56 a head for smaller operations, with an estimated average cost to cow/calf producers of $6.26 per animal, according to research by Christopher Raphael Crosby of Kansas State University's Department of Agricultural Economics published in 2008. A spreadsheet developed by Kansas State University agricultural economist Kevin C. Dhuyvetter and beef specialist Dale Blasi to calculate the costs of a RFID-based animal identification system, published in July 2005, puts the costs at $7.21 per head for a herd of 250 cattle, based on variables including the cost of tags and hardware such as readers and computers. Unfortunately this is very deceiving since the average livestock herd is actually only about 15 animals raising the cost per animal to over $50. This produces a large bias of benefit towards the big producers and harms small local farms who bear an undue burden for a program that gives them little to no benefit.