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Allan wrote:<snip>
"the
big chicken companies...are pushing for illegalizing outdoor chicken
flocks...There is a similar movement underfoot to present barned
beef as the only protection from BSE. (Making Pastured Beef a health
hazard.)"
<snip>
I found this really scary, as I am sure many
others on this list do, but it particularly made me think of a really
interesting interview on NPR I heard a few weeks back. The interview was with
Michael Pollan (author of the Botany of Desire, which I loved) and it was about
his article for the New York Times Magazine, in which he learned about the
standard American feedlot-raised beef by buying a calf himself & being
involved in its short life in that system.
Links to the article & interview are at
the end of this message, & I am not sure how much I can excerpt here without
getting into trouble with NYT, but here's some of what he wrote that relates to
the grass-pasture question.
"Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets
because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal
subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50
cents less than the cost of growing it. The rise of the modern factory farm is a
direct result of these surpluses "
"A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis.
Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is
neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, ...which in some cases can kill the animal
but usually just makes it sick....The condition can
lead to...a general weakening of the immune
system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything....What
keeps a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics....Most
of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed [on the radio, he said
as much as 60%] -- a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads
directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant
''superbugs.''..."
"Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new
strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's)
that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts.
Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection."
"Most of the
microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get
killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live
in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow
is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment
acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach
acids -- and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have
broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can
be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that
switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter
reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent.
Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.
"
I know the pressure Allan spoke of on organic farmers is being hung on
the BSE problem; I don't know if E. Coli works the same way, but it seems that
if switching cattle back to their natural way of life for as short as a few days
makes them freer from E. Coli, then that says something to us about how they
should be raised to protect from all diseases. At the very least, it says that
for their arguments against pasture feeding, the opposite, actually, is
true!
There was a lot more that was interesting in this article about modern
feedlot cattle, regarding the nutrition (or lack of!) in their meat, the
pollution involved in raising so much corn for cattle, the 284 gallons of oil
needed to produce every calf this way, and on and on. You can hear the interview
on NPR's website at:
You can read the full article online at the NYT site, but it requires a
very intrusive registration process first. Anyway, the link for that
is:
Strength & Wisdom,
Micah
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