The calf is raised on a pasture until it is 6 months old and then it is taken to a feedlot to get plumped up. The feedlot is Poky Feeders in Kansas. I found Poky online. http://www.cattlefeeding.com/ This is their "mission" statement, "POKY Feeders provides custom finishing for cattle producers and investors. We convert feeder cattle into finished beef cattle that satisfy the demands of any meat packer. To do this profitably, the cattle must have a fast, consistent rate of gain." When I hear the work poky (or pokey), I think of slowpoke. Someone moving slowly...certainly not a "fast, consistent rate" that they refer to! I think that's interesting. Perhaps it's a family name...or maybe just a reverse-psychology marketing ploy!
MP said Poky had 37,000 cows, but the website currently says 64,000. (The book was published in 2006.) MP paid $1.60 a day to keep his calf there. This is his description of Poky Feeders, "The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste (A.K.A. manure) lagoons on their way to the feedyard's thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of the teeming metropolis of meat."
In the last post, I passed along the info that most animals (even fish!) are fed corn on the feedlot. I never really thought about a cow eating corn as a bad thing. (My husband would be horrified that I used the term "cow" to refer to all types of cows. A cow is really only the female animal that has birthed a calf. I know the differences between bulls, cows, and heifers but it's a lot easier to type cows and you know what I'm talking about.) Corn is a plant and plants are good to eat. Not for cattle. Cattle have four stomachs and regurgitate food from one of the sub-stomachs (the rumen) and re-chew it to break down the food (cud) even more. The pH of the rumen in neutral and uses bacteria to break down food. Eaten in large quantities, corn renders it acidic and a cow can develop acidosis from the high acid content. Also, it can cause abscesses in the liver and bloat (which occurs when the rumen inflates and presses the lungs until suffocation occurs.) MP says, "This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than say, a chicken or pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain."
Why would we do this? Because corn is the cheapest calorie available. And the cheaper we can fatten them up, the more profit we can make. MP says, "The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to compete with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day." CAFOs are so "efficient" that they have driven the animals off of the small farms, which leaves more acreage to grow corn. Great...just what we need...more corn. We also use corn because it fattens up our future hamburgers faster than a pasture full of grass. In the 1950s, cows were 2 or 3 years old when they were slaughtered and now they reach slaughtering weight at 14-16 months of age.
Calves are weened onto this feedlot lifestyle as soon as they are weened from their mothers. Before calves leave the ranch and head for the feedlot, they are confined to a pen, taught to eat from a trough, and are fed small amounts of corn. On the long ride to the feedlot, cows don't eat. When they arrive at the feedlot they are fed hay for a few days to restart their rumens. From then on, they are fed a 75% corn diet. It's the other 25% of their diet that is really disturbing. You can read it right on the Poky website. Liquefied fat (from slaughterhouses), protein supplements (such as molasses and synthetic nitrogen), liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, alfalfa hay, silage, and antibiotics (Rumensin and Tylosin) make up the rest of a cow's diet. That is what we eat every time we munch on factory farmed meat.
The cathedral-like feed mill that MP described electronically mixes the corn and other ingredients with a computer system. Semi-trucks deliver 50 tons of corn every hour to the mill. The mill runs 12 hours a day 7 days a week. The farm will distributes a million pounds of feed a day to 8 1/2 miles of trough. Each cow will eat 32 pounds of feed per day.
Now remember that the little cow bellies can't handle this much corn without getting sick. So those antibiotics are feed to the cows every day. Most antibiotics sold in the US end up in animal feed. Rumensin buffers acidity in the rumen to prevent bloat and acidosis. The Tylosin antibiotic lower liver infection. By feeding healthy cows antibiotics daily, it reduces the effectiveness. So then the antibiotics don't work as well in the sick cows and acidity and liver issues continue. E. coli made a resurgence because it became acid-resistant. Rumens used to have a neutral pH and the microbes would die in our human, acidic stomachs. Now that corn turns the rumen acidic, the E. coli microbes can survive in our acidic stomachs. It was discovered that switching cattle back to a grass/pasture diet before slaughtering reduced E. coli in the animals by as much as 80%. The vet at Poky is quoted in OD saying, "Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space, I wouldn't have a job."
Speaking of the vet, Poky Farms has one vet on staff. Eight cowboys check for sick animals twice a day. There are three animal hospitals on site. Those stats just don't seem to add up considering the 64,000 animals. One vet...three hospitals. One vet...64,000 animals. Three hospitals...64,000 animals. One hospital...21,333 animals. 8 watchdog cowboys...64,000 animals. 1 cowboy...8,000 animals. Maybe that's the norm on farms, but that seems like really high ratios of animals to staff.
If that doesn't convince you that cows shouldn't eat this much corn, perhaps this will. (Some people have a hard time feeling compassionate about animals. But everyone cares about themselves!) Corn-fed beef marbles very well. Marbleizing is intramuscular fat. So, corn-fed beef contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than grass-fed meat. MP writes, "A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef. (Modern-day hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don't have our rates of heart disease.) In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn, human in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn."
MP ends the chapter by discussing why $1.60 seems like a cheap price for room and board considering that he didn't have to factor in the costs of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning research or government subsidies paid to farmers for the corn. It seems that all of these topics are interconnected, but the factory farm just reaps the profits. Multiply $1.60 times the 64,000 animals and you get over $100,000 per day. Oh, right, they have to pay their 8 cowboys...where was my head? I'm sure those cowboys are making millionaire salaries.
All of this info in this post came from 20 pages of the book. If you've liked my posts from OD, perhaps you should read the book. Just reserve a few weeks of you life to do it!
"Poky" reminds me of how French geese were fattened up for their livers to be large and succulent for Pate. They were force fed, with a funnel *poked* down their gullet and the food mix poured in, until it was determined that the bird would yield a large, delectable liver.......
ReplyDeleteManipulation of livestock has been going on a long time, it's just that now it has become dangerous for both the animal, consumer and planet.
It is, indeed, a vicious cycle.