For thousands of years, cows have roamed the range, converting grass's protein into milk and meat. Just look at the American Buffalo, that great animal we killed by the millions.
By the time modern American cows (mature female cattle) are six months old, they've had their last blades of grass. We then feed them on a ration of corn and put them in giant pens (feedlots) along with thousands of other cows. These enclosures are giant meat factories.
We're taking cows which once lived four or five years and shortening their life span to fourteen months or less. It doesn't take long for cows, on a corn ration, to grow to 600-700 pounds as corn has so much food energy that it quickly puts fat on them, creating the marbling effect. This allows the feedlot owners to speed up the cow's life span so that they can be slaughtered much earlier.
Consumers need to understand that cows are ruminants by nature; they're not designed for a ration of corn. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan wrote that when cows are given a choice between corn and hay, they choose hay. Cows love to chew their cud, but they can't when they are only fed corn. Furthermore, corn is not a natural food for cattle, as it creates serious rumen (stomach) problems. Young cows have to be given antibiotics as soon as the corn ration begins, as they get sick with bloating, which means they stop ruminating.
Rumination: When cows eat grass, they ruminate. They chew their cud by regurgitating the food many times -- thirty two times, in fact. This keeps their four stomachs in a healthy alkaline state rather than an acid condition, which results from eating too much corn. If the acidic condition persists, it ulcerates the rumen, the large first compartment of the cow's stomach. Then bacteria escape from the rumen into the bloodstream and end up in the liver, causing abscesses. The cow then has to be given another antibiotic for liver disease. Fifteen to thirty percent of cow livers are too damaged for human consumption.
More Corn Facts Plus Costs:
. We feed cows corn because corn is compact and stores more efficiently than hay bales.
. A bushel of corn in 2006 cost about $2.25 to produce. The actual cost to grow the corn was $3.00 but federal subsidies paid about $.75. Corn made from ethanol, has been in competition with feed corn for the last couple of years. The result is that the cost of corn was driven up.
. In 2008, farmers were receiving $8.00 a bushel, the highest price they've ever received. This is why the cost of food has risen so sharply.
. It cost about $1.60 a day in 2002 to keep an animal in a feedlot. That price quadrupled in 2008.
. It takes "cheap oil" to produce "cheap corn" but that has changed because the price of petroleum has risen substantially. It takes about 100 gallons of oil to grow a single animal. So when you eat meat, you're eating oil.
. Cows are fed 32 pounds of corn a day. Cows produce large amounts of protein: three-and-a-half to four pounds a day, half of which is edible meat. The rest is fat.
. The yield of corn per acre in 1900 was 20 bushels. In the 1990s, it went up to 138 bushels per acre, due to hybrid seed varieties and high amounts of chemical fertilizers, which take a lot of energy to produce.
Source:
To see a short video on animals and factory farming, check out MEATRIX at www.factoryfarm.org.
Cow Cities: Some of the larger feedlot factories have up to 100,000 cows in the space of a couple of hundred acres with huge feedmills reaching several stories high and mountains of manure and lots of stench. The high use of antibiotics keeps the diseases in check. Four global meat companies control over 80 percent of the beef market. They slaughter 81 percent of our beef.
The process of raising the animals is horrible, but the process of slaughtering them is even worse. I'm not going to write about it except to say that a bolt the size of a pencil is shot into the brain of the cow with a pneumatic device called a stunner. You can read about it in Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Cow cities are filled with tons of manure. Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year -- manure that besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7, has high concentrations of drugs like antibiotics.
When cows go to sleep, they lie on their manure. Many steps are taken to make sure the manure doesn't infect the beef, but it happens. This is the main source of food-safety problems with the beef industry. Microbes like E.coli 0157:H7 from the manure get into the meat. This relatively new strain of E. coli comes from the manure of feedlot animals. It occurs because of the acidic condition in the rumens of cows that eat corn. It essentially doesn't exist in the gut of animals that eat grass.
The handling, transportation, and slaughtering of farm animals is federally regulated by the USDA. Numerous violations occur daily. Most inhumane are the daily living conditions in high-production feedlots. As mentioned above, animals are crammed together in dark, feces-filled holding pens. The stench is overwhelming. Cattle, sheep and pigs are routinely castrated without anaesthesia. Calves raised for veal are often held in crates so small the animals aren't able to turn around. They are fed iron-poor diets to cause anemia, which results in more highly valued pale beef.
In addition to antibiotics, the animals are injected with synthetic growth hormones to increase the amount of beef. Similarly, bovine growth hormone is used to increase the amount of fluid milk in cows. The meat industry works hard to eradicate harmful bacteria in the meat, including the use of irradiation.
Research has shown that by simply putting the animals on grass or hay for the last several days of their life, the E. coli microbe population is lowered significantly, as much as 80 percent. James Russell, a scientist at Cornell University, has proposed this method. But the meat industry doesn't want to use this method, as it would mean bringing hay into the feedlot. And besides, the cows would lose some weight. King Corn rules. The corporations that run the food industry rule, along with the lawyers and lobbyists and the "good old boys" network of the USDA and FDA.
IT'S POLITICS AS USUAL
More on Antibiotics: The concentration of animals in pens leads to great stress and exposes animals to high levels of feces and urine. Antibiotics are used to prevent disease in such a system. Also, by using antibiotics non-therapeutically, the animals gain weight faster. The cost of the antibiotics is low enough that feeding the drugs to animals for the extra weight gain produces a profit.
However, bacteria can build resistance to antibiotics when they are exposed to constant low levels of the drugs. Bacteria reproduce rapidly and are able to mutate. The mutations that survive are able to pass on their immunity to their offspring, and thus a new population of bacteria is developed. Through food, the new strains of bacteria can be passed to humans, where they may not respond to antibiotics, either.
A 2003 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that every year in the U.S., 25 million pounds of antibiotics are fed to livestock as feed supplement. This drug load represents a full 70 percent of total US antibiotic production. Most of these animals live in factory farms. Antibiotics are fed to chickens, hogs and cattle, not to cure disease, but to promote growth and compensate for stressful, crowded, unsanitary conditions.
Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep animals from dying of infectious diseases. The Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and every public health expert in the country will tell you that there is a link between human health and the use of antibiotics in agriculture.
The very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria (MRSA) is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS -100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in the American Medical Journal. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. The FDA is doing very little about the problem of MRSA in livestock and neither is the livestock industry. What is the price we are willing to pay for an epidemic caused from industrial farming?
Could it be that Big Macs are part of the reason antibiotics aren't as effective as they once were in humans? And why is it that the viruses and bacteria showing up in hospitals are not treatable by most antibiotics? It's clear that the overuse of antibiotics has led to resistance strains of the new "superbugs."
Food Poisoning: The incidence of food poisoning in humans has also increased in large part because of the large cattle feedlots. What happens when you mix 100 different cow parts in a single burger? The bigger the system, the harder to manage and greater the chance for contamination. All it takes is one infected carcass to spread disease all over the country. Look at the TV pictures of those large vats of raw hamburger being mixed together for patties for fast-food joints and compare those images with one of the local butcher making hamburger from one cow of a local farmer.
The Gulf of Mexico: It may make economic sense to feed cows corn but ecologically it's a disaster. A lot of the manure runoff coming from feedlots in the Midwest is washed down the Mississippi and ends up in the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico where there is a cesspool of chemicals, including pesticides and antibiotics.
The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to the growing "dead zone" -- a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate.
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