They feed cows to fish -- or at least they did.
Mad fish.
:(
-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Addison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 23, 2002 11:30 PM
To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: industrial livestock husbandry was: Re: [biofuels-biz] Re:
[biofuel] toxins in this season U.S. corn
>I;m starting to really get the picture that the jerks (some of them no
>doubt well-intentioned) who developed America's current model of industrial
>agriculture had just a little bit of 'playing god' going on.
Yes, and they still do (GMOs, eg). As for their intentions, how about this?
> >From the 1930's to the 1960's the free-range system was the popular
> >way to raise poultry in the United states. It produced meaty, tender
> >birds at a reasonable cost, using a reasonable amount of labor and
> >providing valuable fertility to the land. Many farmers raised
> >10,000-20,000 birds per year on short-grass pasture ("range"), both
> >chickens and turkeys. With the rise of industrial agriculture and
> >the development of the confinement broiler barn, this sustainable
> >and profitable system was discontinued by means of withdrawing
> >growers contracts. Left with no market or processing facilities the
> >practice was abandoned within two or three years.
>
>But the way it's been presented to the world is that the old ways
>were less efficient. Actually they were more efficient, in more ways
>than one, lacking, for instance, this current feature of the
>"efficient" industrialized poultry production systems:
>
> > >We don't need terrorists, we have industrial food suppliers. Or is it
> > >possible that turkeys have become the weapon of choice for terrorists?
> > >How can we call a food system sustainable that sickens an estimated 1.3
> > >million Americans, hospitalizes 15,000, and kills 500 just from
> >Salmonella every year?
> > >Maybe it would be a good time to switch to something besides a
commercial
> > >turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
http://www.cspinet.org/new/200211211.html
>
>Let alone the manure lakes, groundwater pollution, etc etc etc. In
>France, for instance, in 2000, over 20% of all poultry (90 million
>birds) was profitably, cleanly and safely raised using the old
>free-range system.
Not good intentions, thuggery and incompetence.
>'Carnivorous'
>cows? (ie cannibalistic practices in feed) Cows that are fed their own
>manure as a 'protein supplement'?
Not sure about their own manure, certainly chicken manure. Pigs are
fed their own manure.
>Factory farmed salmon, for instance- almost the opposite of the cows
>described below. The practice involves taking an obviously carnivorous
>fish, confining it and feeding it a vegetarian diet (probably some kind of
>waste product, I imagine). The result is salmon with no color, which are
>then dyed red to make the meat attractive to consumers.
I think a major problem with factory farmed salmon is that they're
NOT fed a vegetarian diet - they're fed on enormous quantities of
wild fish, with a very poor conversion factor, greatly helping to
empty the oceans like some giant vacuum cleaner of no avail. I don't
have all this at my fingertips, let me dig a bit on my hard disk. Hm.
I think this applies to salmon. First, aquaculture is a highly
polluting industry, just as industrialized "farming" is.
"Aquaculture is now the source of 27% of seafood consumed by people
worldwide, since more than a quarter of wild fish harvests are used
in animal feed."
Feeding fish to cows? Certainly to pigs and poultry.
"The Worldwatch Institute says it takes about five grams of fish
protein -- converted into fishmeal -- to make a gram of farmed fish
protein."
I have an idea that one "waste-product" (?) of the fishmeal industry
might be large amounts of fish-oil. No use for biodiesel or SVO
(polymerises like linseed oil) but I guess it could be used for
generation, even if via gasifiers.
This defines it, IMO:
>'Bycatch' -- the collateral damage of industrialised fishing:
>"Around the world, each year, 44 billion pounds of fish plus
>hundreds of thousands of other marine animals are thrown overboard,
>dead and dying." Twenty-five percent of the entire world catch is
>wasted this way.
"Efficiencies of scale", yeah. When applied to sheer wastefulness maybe.
>Disgusting.
Yes, extremely disgusting. :-(
Regards
Keith
>Mark
>
>
>
>
> >A lot of animal manure gets compounded into livestock feeds, also
> >biogas sludge. What they do is measure the protein content and if
> >it's "enough" it must therefore make good feed, wherever it comes
> >from. Actually it's complicated to measure the protein content, so
> >instead they measure the nitrogen content (N) and multiply by 6.25,
> >which is the proportion of N in protein. But it's a bit of an
> >assumption that all of it will be protein, a lot of it is probably
> >just nitrates and nitrites (which aren't good for you!). Too much
> >soluble nitrogen or urea in feed causes high blood urea or ammonia
> >levels, leading to reduced resistance to bacterial infection, and I'd
> >say that's just a part of it.
> >
> >Albrecht of Missouri, the doyen of soils scientists, pointed out that
> >cattle avoid eating the taller and greener grass growing round manure
> >"pies" in the pasture because the plants' fertility is out of
> >balance, with too much nitrogen provided by the manure. "Cows are
> >competent chemists," he wrote, and proved it too. More competent than
> >chemists maybe.
> >
> >Anyway feeding grain and high-protein supplements to ruminants just
> >doesn't make any sense, they're made to eat grass, to turn
> >low-protein feed into high-protein meat, and they're brilliant at it.
> >They don't thrive on this high-protein stuff, though they might
> >appear to. But look at all the problems.
> >
> >If you graze them, you get much healthier animals, much healthier
> >meat, good production, low costs, and after a couple of years there's
> >enough sheer fertility in that pasture to grow six years of
> >succeeding crops without any further inputs. That's the whole basis
> >of the mixed-farming rotation that's now been abandoned in favour of
> >this wasteful, troublesome, expensive and unhealthy industrialized
> >junk. AND if you do it this way livestock production isn't wasteful,
> >as alleged by Pimentel et al, giving good (?) food to animals instead
> >of to hungry people: with mixed-farming rotations the animals provide
> >very much more food than they consume (only grass), in both animal
> >products and the succeeding crops. Rational.
> >
> >A good example of the problems with industrialized livestock
> >production is the killer E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. Cornell University
> >found that virulent strains of E. coli develop in the digestive tract
> >of cattle mainly fed with starchy grain. Cows mainly fed with hay
> >generate less than 1% of the E. coli found in the faeces of grain-fed
> >animals. Nearly all cases of E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning result from
> >contaminated meat from industrial factory farms and meat processing
> >plants. USDA vets say 80 to 100% of feedlot cattle tested carried the
> >deadly 0157:H7 strain. Meanwhile researchers have found that
> >pesticide sprays encourage life-threatening bacteria to grow on
> >crops, including E. coli O157:H7, increasing bacteria counts as much
> >as one-thousandfold. Etc etc. If the aflatoxin doesn't get you
> >something else probably will!
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