High price of corn forcing farmers to feed candy to livestock

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/ky-state-news/High-price-of-corn-forcing-farmers-to-feed-candy-to-livestock-166004506.html

by ggasp • 14 years ago

25 51 14 years ago

wpsdlocal6.com

thedangler• 14 years ago

Hmmm, why don't they feed them grass? Isn't that what they are supposed to be eating? I'm no farmer, honest question.

zinssmeister• 14 years ago

that wouldn't make them fat enough.

TGJ2• 14 years ago

Animals do not grow as fast on grass. Also, they do not taste the way Americans like their animals to taste. Land availability also plays a factor as it takes more acre per animal using grass vs corn/sugar.

ipince• 14 years ago

I'm no farmer either, but I assume grass doesn't have the effect they're looking for (weight gain), and they'd probably need much more of it.

TGJ2• 14 years ago

Also, check Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan for an in depth look at America, corn and other food.

ggasp2• 14 years ago

What about "Because drought affects all living plants not only corn"?

knieveltech2• 14 years ago

You've got ranchers in places like Wyoming where the forage is barely sufficient to keep livestock alive. Cattle raised under these conditions have to be fattened up before they can be sent to a slaughterhouse. Typically these cows will be shipped to another ranch that specializes in this before then being shipped to market. It sounds like the guy quoted in the article is running one of these secondary "fattening" ranches.

Since grain (or in this case candy) has a much higher energy content than grass, cattle can be raised to market weight much faster than if they were fed a grass diet.

Edit: I accidentally a word.

juniorplenty• 14 years ago

"Ranch" isn't really what we're talking about here; cattle are sent from ranches to feed lots for fattening (which is what this guy is running, hence the ability to gin up new chemi-food on site.)

Feed lots are very highly concentrated populations of cattle that are fed a regulated diet of grain (corn) mixed with concentrated antibiotics and, in this case, rotten chocolate. Another commenter already referenced Pollan's work, which exposes the tradeoffs of this industrialized approach. Among these are increased e.coli outbreaks (as e.coli concentrate in the rumen of the cow when it tries to digest grain,) and the increased likelihood of antibiotic-resistent bacteria developing because of the tremendous amount of antibiotics used to keep animals living in these conditions from getting sick:

http://www.oklahomafarmreport.com/wire/news/2010/07/media/00...

(That ankle-deep black stuff is poo, which also runs and collects in giant sewer pools that generate toxic runoff.)

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Main reason is 'speed to fatness' the second reason is that he doesn't have corn because of a drought, which also affects not having grass (or more typically hay/alfalfa)

harrylove• 14 years ago

Yes, cows are supposed to eat grass. That is a part of their natural diet. There are farms in America that focus on sustainable agriculture and ethical animal husbandry. This article is talking about a factory farm, which focuses on profit.

tocomment• 14 years ago

I've always wondered if you could combine a sod farm and cattle ranch? You've got to cut the grass anyway.

I'm sure there would be problems such as trampling the grass, over-grazing, but maybe they're solvable??

eeeeaaii2• 14 years ago

Yes that is what they are supposed to be eating. Their digestive systems have evolved over millions of years to eat grass, and if they eat grass they will be healthier animals, and their meat will taste like real beef and not like tasteless cardboard. I pretty much stick exclusively to grass-fed beef. There are all these complex chemical compounds in grass that flavor the meat and give it rich and distinctive notes -- as the other commenter said, read Omnivore's Dilemma. The cattle are supposed to be able to walk around, too.

The reason it's not done is cost. Grass fed beef is easily twice as expensive as corn-fed beef. The cheapest way to raise cattle is to raise them in a CAFO, and feed them the cheapest possible feed, which has been corn for quite a long time. The farmer who is feeding his cattle candy is really just feeding them yesterday's corn, as most American candy is made from high fructose corn syrup. Walk into a supermarket sometime and count the number of products that use HFCS -- it's staggering. The price of corn going up is actually really big news -- if it's a sustained trend it's going to have a far-reaching impact on American agriculture.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

I don't find that beef ever tastes like tasteless cardboard, unless it is cooked completely incorrectly.

Without arguing about whether grass-fed beef is tastier in general, I wonder if anyone has ever done a blind test to discover if the grass (you know, the complex compounds flavoring the meat) can actually be tasted in the beef by an ordinary person.

As you observe, not everyone can afford grass-fed beef.

joshcrews• 14 years ago

America ought to think about that question deeply. Corn fed ground beef in the supermarket is $3-4 per pound while grass raised ground beef is $7-$9 per pound. We (Americans) are making ourselves very sick with degenerative diseases (cancer, heart, alzeimer's, dementia, arthritis) at rates orders of magnitude larger than our ancestors. I believe the race to make cheap food (corn feed beef in this example) is causing health suffering on the backend (degenerative disease)

beothorn• 14 years ago

The rate of those types of disease being higher are maybe also a consequence of a longer lifespan.

typicalrunt• 14 years ago

Feeding your cattle a mixture of second-hand chocolate, ethanol by-products and minerals doesn't sound very tasty, from this beef consumer's point of view. There is the saying of "you are what you eat" and I wonder if any of those flavours will come out in the final product.

But more importantly, IANAFarmer, but I don't understand why cattle need to be fat in order to be profitable. Don't the farmers want their cattle to have high protein/muscle content versus high fat content?

ggasp2• 14 years ago

Cattle is buy/sell in auction-like markets with price set per kilo.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Beef cows are sold 'by the pound' so farmers look at the cost of adding pounds to the price per pound and solve for the greatest $.

As for the feed vs the taste, I literally put chicken shit on the ground my tomatoes are growing in and it makes them both larger and tastier. Biological transformation is a magical thing in many ways.

jetti• 14 years ago

"As for the feed vs the taste, I literally put chicken shit on the ground my tomatoes are growing in and it makes them both larger and tastier. Biological transformation is a magical thing in many ways."

But you don't put chicken shit IN your tomatoes!

I wonder how it makes the cows feel after eating it, e.g do they know the difference or is it like when my dog eats something off the sidewalk when I'm not looking and then mopes around for the rest of the day 'cause she doesn't feel well.

brodney• 14 years ago

There's a reason the chicken poop causes your tomatoes to grow bigger and taste better. I don't imagine you'd feed that poop to a cow thinking it would grow bigger and tastier.

FootballMuse• 14 years ago

I like curves in all the right places!

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

As others already answered, lean meat weights less, therefore it's less money per cattle. The majority of the fat on cattle is in-between the muscle fibers.

gliese13372• 14 years ago

Right. You don't want big blobs of fat that someone's just going to cut off- but you don't want a totally dry steak, either. You want the meat to be nicely "marbled", fat and oil distributed throughout.

d3ad1ysp0rk• 14 years ago

Since when? Are cows somehow the opposite of humans in that their fat weighs more than their muscle?

lmkg• 14 years ago

> Don't the farmers want their cattle to have high protein/muscle content versus high fat content?

Nope. Fat tastes better. Fattier beef is higher-quality and sells for more per pound (aside from having more pounds overall).

jack-r-abbit5• 14 years ago

Although, lean ground beef (93/7) generally is at least a buck more per pound than fattier ground beef (80/20). I kind of suspect that is because it is harder to separate more fat out when grinding. I imagine it takes more work to get 93/7 than it does to get 80/20.

bunderbunder3• 14 years ago

> Don't the farmers want their cattle to have high protein/muscle content versus high fat content?

Not really. Marbling is a coveted feature in beef because folks tend to think fattier food tastes better. Marbling is largely just a euphemism for fatty. For example, beef has to surpass a minimum fat threshold to qualify as USDA Prime or Kobe beef. And getting that stamp lets the farmer get a higher price - so farmers who are selling to the general market do want a higher fat content.

ryandvm• 14 years ago

Wow - Idiocracy was such a prophetic movie. Just waiting for the news that we're hydrating crops with Brawndo.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

You would rather that food unsuitable for human consumption were thrown out to rot rather than feeding livestock?

zzzeek2• 14 years ago

real food is compostable, allowing it to contribute right back to the food production system.

I'm not sure if this applies to stale Fruit Loops though. I certainly don't want them anywhere near my food supply.

jack-r-abbit5• 14 years ago

IANAFarmer but I grew up on a farm (not a commercial one... just for family needs) and we routinely fed our pigs what ever we could get from the "Day Old Bakery" when it was too old/damaged even for them. While a good portion of it was usually just old bread, it was not uncommon for half a truck load to be entirely made up of smashed fruit pies and donuts. Our pork always tasted good. I would not be too concerned with eating meat from a cow that was raised on a regulated diet of chocolate and supplements.

gliese13372• 14 years ago

Someone seems to do a story on this kind of thing every year. Last time I heard about it, it was local farmers feeding their cows past-due fruit loops and other sugary cereal. So it's hardly an uncommon sort of thing in general. If it's digestible and not poisonous, a cow has probably been made to eat it.

Qworg4• 14 years ago

Cows will eat most anything. It doesn't mean they should.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

What is your concern about the cow eating old chocolate?

RexM• 14 years ago

I read the article, hoping the farmer was feeding the cattle Candy Corn :(

rmason• 14 years ago

In Michigan this is not that unusual. I worked in the fertilizer industry as an agronomist. I have routinely seen animals fed cereal (Kellogg's and Post are headquartered here), day old bread and even cupcakes.

As long as the overall ration is balanced it doesn't make a difference in the final product.

http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/compute/balance.htm

FWIW I bought my dad (who was a feed salesman) a TI programmable calculator in the seventies that used magnetic strips to run programs and wrote him a feed balancing ration program. Far as we know he was the only one in the world at the time who had a hand held ration balancer!

zzzeek2• 14 years ago

the comments here are unsurprising, I guess it's just an outrageous notion to suggest that eating meat may expose us to at least some aspects of what the animal was fed all its life (which may just as well mean an insufficient level of necessary nutrients, as much as it may mean exposure to negative substances).

Here's a PDF from the Union of Concerned Scientists, just regarding the potential dietary advantages of grass fed beef: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_environment/... The concept of "we're affected by what the cow eats" isn't novel. Eating meat that was raised on candy or fruit loops is revolting.

High price of corn forcing farmers to feed candy to livestock

Related Stories