The Food Chain Works
By Trent LoosWhen I was a kid, we would feed between 12 and 15 steers each year to butcher. We always ran a small group of pigs in the same pen to “follow up the steers.” For those of you that may not have had the good fortune of such an up bringing, what passed through the cows, along with some supplemental protein, was enough to get any hog ready for market.
The first BSE case in the United States has come and gone, but if we don’t get on the stick, aftershocks like the excerpt above are going to be deadly.
Whatever else it is -- nutritious, economical, the polar opposite of wasteful -- you can't help feeling that the convoluted new food chain that industrial agriculture has devised for the animals we eat (and thus for us) is, to be unscientific for a moment, disgusting.
Michael Pollan quote from the New York Times Sunday, Jan. 11, 2004
We have, in this country, a group of elitists that have no clue how the food chain works. These people are attempting to capitalize on the BSE situation by grossing out the every day consumer about conventional food supplies. They want us all to eat only organic, natural or grass fed. I have no problem with a producer capitalizing on any one of those niches, but only if they market their product on it’s merits instead of casting a huge shadow on the rest of food production.
Every day since Dec. 23, 2003, there have been articles printed by activists attempting to shed light on the terrible feed ingredients used by “industrial agriculture.” I have read about feeding blood to calves, feeding poultry litter to cattle and feeding ground pig and chicken parts to other animals. They also mislead consumers by suggesting that these animals are vegetarians.
Obviously, they left a few things out. What is the first thing a cow does after calving? She licks here calf and eats the afterbirth. Human mothers don’t do that! If you give our free-range chickens a beef ribcage, they will peck the meat off those bones in a fashion that makes “advanced meat recovery” look like a technology of yesteryear. And the pigs that “followed up” our steers would have chosen a cow-pie over my mom’s apple pie any day of the week.
These anti-ag elitists suggest that the evils of our society are the fault of profit hungry industrial agriculturists. Is this the same group that thinks wild salmon are better than farm raised salmon? Do they know that a salmon swims up-stream to lay her eggs and dies so, as she floats back down stream, the other fish can eat her decaying body? Is this the same group of elitists that eats raw oysters on the half shell? Do they know we call them filter fish because their nutrients come from cleaning the water?
Isn’t that appetizing? And they can’t understand why we feed chicken litter. It grosses them out. The same chicken litter can be applied to a soybean plant. The nutrients are absorbed and produce nutrients for human consumption called protein but they think nothing of that.
Since WWII, we have learned to be efficient with our nation’s natural resources. In the world of food production, we are proud to state that nothing goes to waste from the cow other than the moo. Everything has a place and a purpose in the food chain.
Another inaccuracy by the “anti’s” suggests that we feed cheap corn to fatten cattle faster to increase profitability for industrial agriculture. In fact, 70% of the total diet consumed by beef cattle in the United States is forages. Cattle convert feeds not suitable for human consumption into a food rich in zinc, iron and protein that people can eat.
If these elitists, a mere 2% of our population, want to pay more for their food, that is great. I will gladly change my production methods to accommodate their whims as long as they are willing to compensate me for the effort. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that there are 290 million people in this country. The USDA considers 12 million households to be food insecure and 1/3 of those to be hungry. The vast majority (98%) of the people in this country want food to be safe for their families and want it cost as little as possible. Our challenge in food production is to prevent the elitists from enacting additional regulations that would make it more difficult to feed the hungry people in this country and around the world.
If the elitists are not happy to be at the top of the food chain, they have every right to go down with the chickens, pigs and cattle but they don’t have a right to force feed the rest of us their fecal follies.
