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Sweet Times For Cows As Gummy Worms Replace Corn Feed
PolygamousRanchKid writes "As the worst drought in half a century has ravaged this year's U.S. corn crop and driven corn prices sky high, the market for alternative feed rations for beef and dairy cows has also skyrocketed. Brokers are gathering up discarded food products and putting them out for the highest bid to feed lot operators and dairy producers, who are scrambling to keep their animals fed.
In the mix are cookies, gummy worms, marshmallows, fruit loops, orange peels, even dried cranberries. Cattlemen are feeding virtually anything they can get their hands on that will replace the starchy sugar content traditionally delivered to the animals through corn.
Operators must be careful to follow detailed nutritional analyses for their animals to make sure they are getting a healthy mix of nutrients, animal nutritionists caution. But ruminant animals such as cattle can safely ingest a wide variety of feedstuffs that chickens and hogs can't.
The candy and cookies are only a small part of a broad mix of alternative feed offerings for cattle. Many operators use distillers grains, a byproduct that comes from the manufacture of ethanol."
Sounds like a great CJD transmission vector.
It is? I would have had the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in factory farms pegged as the cause to antibiotic resistance in E. Coli.
Strage as it sounds, yes it is. There have been a great many scientific studies and articles published on the subject since the mid 80s. Basically it comes down to how the cows dont have the digestive system to handle the grains which results in PH changes in their stomaches allowing e.coli to thrive and survive being "passed" by the cows. The resulting e.coli laden excrement gets stuck to the cows and does not properly get washed off during processing into meat. The solution the beef industry came up with was to wash the meat in ammonia rather then switch to grass feed even for a couple weeks towards the end of the cows life.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
No good came from feeding them corn
Lol, wut?
I.e. fattening them up. Changed the entire industry of cattle from range fed (grasses) to loading them up with Corn, which is a water-hungry crop. With the mentality of Wall Street, the cattle industry has gone after maximizing profits - steroids to fatten them up even more, antibiotics (which remain in the meat, even after cooking, so you end up with antibiotic resistant strains developing, not to overlook constant exposure to antibiotics hammers your own immune system) and a dependency upon water and petroleum, it's becoming less suitable to areas of land as the damage to land can be considerable, plus it has brought us the wonders of invasive plant species, thanks to feed coming from where-ever is cheap and available.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I grew up on a small farm with free-range chickens. Chickens are omnivores. They aren't quite as good at digesting weird things as ruminants, but they come pretty close. Consider that both are quite well adapted for eating grass. It's tough to get much in the way of nutrition out of grass, but they both manage it. In fact, their digestive systems bear some similarities. While a ruminant will puke up there food to reprocess it in their mouth, the chickens have a gizzard for a pre-stomach. The gizzard is full of rocks, and has a strong band of muscles around it which grinds the food apart before it ever gets to their stomach.
Furthermore, we fed our chickens scraps. You have to, as the summary points out, be careful with nutrition. Chickens will gorge themselves on moldy bread, cookies, etc. instead of proper food if you give them a chance. But if you're careful to not feed them too much junk at a time it can be quite economical, and the chickens love it. We used to get rejected hamburger buns and feed it to them. There's nothing quite so amusing as tossing a single bun into the air, and watching all the chickens scattered across a couple acres come barreling up to you, flapping and squawking.
This isn't new, and it isn't really news. I'm sure it happens more now, as the designed food gets more expensive, but it's an old practice.
I.e. fattening them up. Changed the entire industry of cattle from range fed (grasses) to loading them up with Corn, which is a water-hungry crop.
Bah. Corn's photosynthesis cycle is more than 10 times as efficient as grass's. Sure it's a water hungry crop; it's just a much less land hungry crop for the same production, which means less land area under cultivation per cow. Less land per food is a Good Thing when people are starving in some parts of the world. Less land per food means lower food prices and higher availability (given a reasonably free market.) It also means less erosion, less pollution, less CO2 release, and higher population average leisure time.
All the things you mentioned do, indeed, increase profits. But they also lower costs, both to produce and to consume food. You can claim we should eat less meat, as it has relatively high impact on the environment per pound; you're right. But it would have even more impact if we switched to 'organic' or 'grass-fed' meat. There may be good reasons to buy organic; it may be healthier, lower risk of E. coli, more humane treatment of animals, and it just plain tastes good! But recognize, that whenever you indulge these scruples, you do it at the cost of the environment.
It's by far easier to get the food to the cows. Feeding most of those who die of malnutrition involves the following:
1. Get together enough food.
2. Send an armed force to overthrow the government or local warlord who is ruling the area where people are dying of malnutrition. If not, the ruling party will simply claim the food or stop the aid.
3. Deliver the food
4. Remain in the region indefinitely to keep the peace all the while the local region becomes more and more dissatisfied with the outside invaders and the casualties continue to mount.
5. Eventually leave the region and watch the warlords / corrupt governments return or civil war breaks out.
So in this case, feeding the cows gummy worms doesn't sound like that bad of a deal.