Livestock
The Meat Market's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Published August 04, 2009 @ 08:38PM PT
Dear The Meat Industry,
When you complain on one hand that your business will be hurt by country of origin labeling laws, and on the other that it's unfair to criticize the US meat industry because of greenhouse gas emissions from meat production in other countries, it makes you sound like you need Ritalin.
In other news, cows need to eat grass, bozos.
Kissy the face,
n
(Photo credit: laenulfean on Flickr.)
A Big Food Safety Problem
Published July 30, 2009 @ 11:29AM PT
Sick cows are one of our biggest food safety problems:
... Acidosis is often associated with a shift from a foragebased diet to a high concentrate-based diet or excessive consumption of fermentable carbohydrates. Acidosis may occur in cattle on high-grain diets common with youth livestock projects, bull development programs, and cattle finishing programs. It can also occur in stocker calves when self-feeders and highstarch feeds such as corn are used.
Acidosis is the result of low rumen pH. The typical pH of the rumen on a forage-based diet is 6 to 7. As the amount of forage or roughage in the diet decreases and the amount of concentrate increases, the pH of the rumen falls between 5 and 6, depending on the forage to concentrate ratio of the diet. Low pH supports growth of lactic acid-producing bacteria. Lactic acid is very strong and reduces rumen pH even more. Acute (severe) acidosis occurs when ruminal pH drops below 5.2, while subacute (less severe) acidosis occurs at a ruminal pH of less than 5.6. Laminitis, liver abscesses, and polioencephalomalacia often accompany acidosis. ...
Cows with acidosis, who've been fed grain instead of forage, produce deadly E. coli that can survive our stomachs. Healthy cows with a nearly neutral rumen pH still have E. coli in their guts, but these varieties of the bacterium are easily handled by our bodies.
The food safety bill that may be resurrected this week, H.R. 2749, does not address this topic, even though it laudably expands federal food recall powers beyond the toothless "voluntary recall." It does impose regressive fees on the sort of small producers not generally responsible for large-scale food contamination.
Congressional leadership may also put it up for a vote under a closed rule, which means no amendments can be offered. Again, I point you to the Center for Rural Affairs analysis of the vote situation. I'd hope that the pressure Congress feels to do something doesn't lead, as it so often does, to doing something stupid.
Living the Animal Life
Published July 14, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even be.
It won't pass. Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start.
The bill is Rep. Louise Slaughter's (D-NY) offering to ban non-medicinal, preemptive use of antibiotics in livestock.
In large part, as the article notes, these are used to promote growth. However, it's the barely mentioned "prevent illnesses" part that's of most concern. Eddie Gehman Kohn talks here about the way this practice is turning antibiotics into worthless candy by spurring the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, but that's still a side effect - though a powerful and frightening one. The main point of these drugs is to prevent animals that are raised in utterly vile conditions from simply keeling over dead before they can be slaughtered.
If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity.
As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious.
They're fed a grain diet, now that it's no longer allowed to feed these obligate herbivores ground up bones and scrap from other cattle, which is like feeding a human an all-Twinkie diet. They get permanent acidosis, roughly equivalent to a terrible case of chronic ulcers, and the bacteria from their guts are able to escape to infect the rest of their bodies. This commonly leaves their livers abcessed and scarred, not entirely unlike what would happen in a human with advanced cirrhosis of the liver.
Imagine humans kept wading in sh*t all day, force-fed to the point of severe obesity, suffering all the while from ulcers and cirrhosis. Those people's immune systems would be extremely compromised. They would need constant doses of antibiotics just to stay alive.
I don't make this comparison to say that animals should be treated like humans, but that they should be treated like animals.
They should be let out on real grass, on well-managed pasture where their numbers are just right to stimulate and fertilize the growth of a healthy prairie. They should be able to move around in the open air, where their immune systems will be supported by a proper diet and exercise, be part of an ecosystem that's very close to a naturally evolved grassland, have a quick death-by-predator (if we insist on being their only predators, we should do it right and be merciful) and the remains returned to the ground for the plants to eat.
This is what they're for. If we are to be sensible managers of the Earth's resources, getting this right is crucial to preserving what's going to be left over when the planet's freshwater and topsoil reserves can no longer handle the levels of grain production asked of them now. Getting this right is crucial to having livestock be a source of health instead of disease.
The Fertilizer Divide
Published July 01, 2009 @ 12:19PM PT
While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.
Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.
While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.
Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.
Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:
Market Consolidation and Anti-Trust
Published June 23, 2009 @ 08:39PM PT
There's a play on words in there somewhere, where could it be ... Oh, right, back to the task at hand. Jill Richardson explains the need for livestock competition reform:
... When [a government pricing error and evidence of industry market manipulation, including underpayment of meat producers,] came to light, the rancher mentioned above, Herman Schumacher of South Dakota, joined with two others and sued the beefpacking companies (Tyson, Excel, and Swift) to obtain the money lost during those six weeks. (Schumacher, by the way, has long been a thorn in the side of Big Beef, testifying on the injustice in the beef industry before the Senate Ag Committee in 1998.) The ranchers won - and then the case went to appeal and they lost. Whereas a jury sided with Schumacher (and awarded the class of cattle producers $9.25 million - about $40 per cow), [but the award was appealed, and the appeals court decided that it wasn't enough to have proved that the packers broke the law.]
... Now Schumacher is undergoing retaliation by Tyson, who demands that he pay their court costs - a hefty $15,881.38. And, according to R-CALF, the U.S. Marshals have been called in to enforce this by seizing Schumacher's home if he does not pay. ...
The USDA failed to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) of 1921 for the whole of the Bush administration and now the courts have found that ranchers don't even have standing to sue for damages over it unless they can prove 'intent.'
Such are the perks of big business-class, corporate citizenship. The law doesn't apply to you. You can harm the interests of consumers and small businesses almost with impunity.
Though it's a situation that would have disgusted the people who dreamed of a nation of laws and not men. It would have disgusted Adam Smith, the moral philosopher who invented capitalism, to see such powerful monopolies still running the show and claiming to be following the system he proposed to rid the world of mercantilism and all-powerful guilds.
This isn't democracy and it isn't capitalism. And whatever it should be called, I doubt the proper term is very polite.
(Photo credit: Sunfox on Flickr.)
Collin Peterson, Congress in Denial
Published June 23, 2009 @ 02:24PM PT
Collin Peterson may be the only person in politics who believes in global warming and is thrilled about its prospects for agriculture. Ahem. That this suggests, as Brad Johnson points out over at the Wonkroom, that he doesn't actually believe in it must remain in the realm of conjecture for now.
But seriously, Peterson said, "We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn."
Are there actually any farmers who are pro-flood and drought? That question sort of answers itself. As further noted at the Wonkroom:
The report Peterson dismissed as being good news for farmers also shows that if no action is taken to halt global warming, the U.S. grain belt could see one to two months of heat waves over 100°F and two to three months of heat waves over 90°F by the end of the century. Corn, by the way, “will fail to reproduce at temperatures above 95°F.”
Chris Bowers amply described the political situation around Peterson's hold up of the climate bill, which got around 300 pages added to the still-fluid legislation.
Peterson's getting information in hearings and political backing from people like American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman, who thinks the only agricultural implications of climate change are higher energy costs.
World According to Monsanto, pt 4, rBGH and Bt Crops
Published June 18, 2009 @ 03:37PM PT
This installment of the World According To Monsanto documentary (and a big shout out to Robert Wager, who convinced me that I wasn't taking a nearly hard enough line on biotech) starts out talking about rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone.
Understand that this hormone is a mimic of a hormone naturally found in cows' bodies during a certain stage of their development. It's nothing very strange.
Nonetheless, rBGH use in adult milk cows causes painful, continuous udder infections and other health problems. This requires the use of constant, elevated doses of antibiotics, and there still ends up being pus in the resulting milk. The hormone isn't reactive in human bodies; not directly, not until it breaks down, and then it seems to promote reproductive cancers.
It's extremely important to understand that protein and hormone interactions in living bodies are very complex. Introducing a hormone at the wrong developmental stage can prove a disaster. Introducing a normally safe protein or compound at high doses, or to the wrong person, or with the wrong chemical companions, can be a disaster.
This is why controlled, independent safety testing is important when introducing novel compounds to the food system or medical repertoire.
Even though rBGH is ostensibly natural, it isn't normally present in adult cows at these artificial levels, or in food that we've had a chance to try over the long term for safety. This is where the equivalence arguments fall down, because even a cursory understanding of the problems inherent in the safety testing of medicinal and food compounds reveals cases where assumptions of safety were badly misplaced because one compound seemed to be 'just like' some other, normally encountered compound.
Sometimes, problems don't reveal themselves for decades.
With Bt crops, not only are they far more expensive and higher input than traditional crop varieties, but it still requires plenty of pesticides and may cause allergic reactions.
The Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin comes from a bacteria and no amount of garden-variety plant breeding or typical food preparation technique would ever add significant quantities of it to the human diet. Yet Bt crops produce this toxin throughout their tissues, including the edible portions.
Perhaps stories of animals dying after foraging on crop remains, something that rarely happens in the US because of the separation of animal and crop agriculture, are anecdotal and not related. I want a public, independent, well-controlled study to prove it.
Perhaps stories of field workers getting allergic reactions from handling Bt cotton are anecdotal, maybe they were reacting to some crop chemical or other unknown allergen. Prove it. Run proper studies and make the data public.
'It's safe because we said so,' whether the 'we' at this point is the biotech firms or their cowering minions at USDA and the land grant universities, cuts no ice.
There's very little in the history of industrial agriculture that leads me to believe they should get the benefit of the doubt.
