Feedlot Cattle

On: Where the Beef had Been in "Meat and Potatoes" by Eric Schlosser, Rolling Stone; 11/26/98, Issue 800, pg68,13p

and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, chapter 4 "The Feedlot"

These sections of reading focused on the production of corn-fed cattle raised on CAFOs (aka “factory farms”). Many aspects of their production was touched upon including living conditions, feed products and additives including hormones and feeding sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics, and environmental risks arising from this mode of production.
The general idea portrayed through Pollan’s chapter was the mess we have gotten into by raising massive amounts of cattle on a mainly corn diet, in hopes of producing a cheap meat in the shortest amount of time possible. The problem arose when the surplus of “cheap” American corn was directed towards the cattle industry (among others including chicken and salmon.) Cattle are ruminants, therefore designed to digest diets high in cellulose- grass. When they were suddenly fed diets of 32 lbs of feed/day (3/4 of that being corn), the animals were faced with converting a food that was not meant to be digested. This leads to numerous health issues including Acidosis and bloat. These issues are in turn treated with numerous hormones and antibiotics to ensure faster growth with less feed (to keep the consumer happy with low meat prices)- yet hormones and antibiotics are the very things that people don’t want to see in their meat. This begs the question, how “cheap” is cheap corn when it must be supplemented with so many additives to provide a proper healthy/balanced diet for the animal?
Then comes the distinction between grass-fed and corn-fed cattle. While corn-fed can be produced in a shorter time span, with more of the fatty “marbling” that is so desired by consumers today, “growing meat on grass makes superb ecological sense: it is a sustainable, solar-powered food chain that produces food by transforming sunlight into protein” (Pollan, 70). The waste from grass-fed cattle can be much more easily recycled back to the land which sustains them, whereas CAFO waste isn’t directly returnable to the land due to its high level of nitrogen, phosphorus and hormone residues. Pollan also mentions that “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, humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn” (Pollan, 75).

For thought:
-To what extent are people willing to risk their cheap meat for what may be more environmentally friendly?
- CAFOs are no doubt efficient when it comes to diluting out fixed costs associated with production, but how does their total environmental impact really compare to cattle raised on pasture?
More insight to come...