The Abstinence Method – Dutch farmers say no to antibiotics for livestock

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/abstinence-method/

by Mz • 12 years ago

295 99 12 years ago

Mz5• 12 years ago

I upvoted a different story from this site and somehow found myself reading this (no doubt an oopsy of mousing) and trying to figure out the tie-in to the title I thought I was reading. :-P Having figured out my error, I think this is a far more fascinating piece about one country deciding to drastically reduce its use of antibiotics in meat production.

Excerpts:

There are points of tension. Disease-prevention dosing can be a hedge against sloppy practices: With the drugs no longer available, farmers have to pay close attention to hygiene, diet and stress. Not all are willing to do so.

And:

Oosterlaken also revels in the challenge of farming without the crutch of antibiotics, and proudly shows off the changes he has made on his farm. He is obsessive about biosecurity, requiring visitors to shower and shampoo, change into fresh clothes and underwear that he supplies and then don scrubbed boots color-keyed to different areas.

Retric• 12 years ago

I think the most shocking point is To this day, when members of Dutch farm families go into hospitals, they are put into isolation rooms until lab tests show they are clear of the germ.

That has got to change peoples mindsets and could easily end up happening in the US.

Mz5• 12 years ago

To me, the most shocking (and also encouraging) point is that before they made this decision: ... farms in the Netherlands were European leaders in antibiotic use.

They seem to have done an about face. This gives me hope that minds can be changed elsewhere.

speleding• 12 years ago

Actually, it is not entirely impossible that with the prevalence of MRSA bacteria in the US there will come a point when US visitors to Dutch hospitals will need to be quarantined as a precaution.

The resulting headlines would make a powerful agent for change indeed.

Cthulhu_4• 12 years ago

Such precautions remind me of the 'mad cow disease' outbreak some years ago in the UK and Netherlands; not a bad approach, really. You're trying to chuck tens of thousands of animals on as small an area as possible (NL isn't too large after all), just like people that's a huge hygiene and potential disease outbreak risk. It's one way to deal with overpopulation.

w0utert• 12 years ago

Mad cow disease (BSE) was not related to hygiene or how many animals were crammed into how little space. It was caused by mixing their food with the ground-down remains of other cows, especially their brain parts.

bra-ket• 12 years ago

related: The global threat of antibiotic resistance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7674550

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

What an inspiring story. The dutch seem to be particularly good at quantifying externalities and negotiating change, which may be due to their 'Polder model' of governance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model

nasmorn• 12 years ago

I just saw a documentary on German tv showimg mich the Same thing for Danish pig farmers so it is not an isolated example. It is a simple issue of incentives.

Even more impressive was that zero anti biotics use in pig farming practiced by a farmer who had his pigs in stables with free range access was only 40% more expensive. Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement in human health for cheaper bacon.

rejschaap4• 12 years ago

It is not that simple though. It is rational to not eat meat that contains antibiotics or fruit and vegetables that contain pesticides. But you need the time, money, resources, knowledge and organisation to actually pull it off. I don't know there is some sort of Maslow pyramid for countries, but a lot of countries might just not be ready to face this problem just yet. For instance, China wasn't too bothered about pollution until recently, they were (and still are) busy raising the general standard of living. Similarly, the United States might not be ready to attack this problem just yet because they are busy attacking... other things.

Cthulhu_4• 12 years ago

Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement in human health for cheaper bacon.

Because that's what the consumer wants. Apparently. Supermarkets have been competing with each other on prices for ages, a well-known example is chicken fillet. The price has gone down to just E3 per kilo at one point, which caused a bit of a riot because those were the famous 'plofkip' (exploding chicken), or chickens that were forced to grow as large as possible in as little time as possible.

But there's the other side, too; farms like the one described in the opening post can thank their existence over an increase in demand for 'organic' meat, or meat that gets a label indicating it was grown in an animal-friendly fashion without use of antibiotics and growth hormone. Conscious consumers with a decent income will be more inclined to pay a premium for that kind of meat.

TheCondor• 12 years ago

And, when you get down to brass tacks, I would not be at all surprised if it was better tasting bacon too... How are the Europeans able to do this? Is there an opposition view? Surely some farmers couldn't change and went out of business or something, right? It just seems too pragmatic and agreeable, it's almost like it makes sense. Surely near term profits are an issue there as well.

In the US, agriculture is huge money, just beef alone is a $200b+ industry. Then there are all these backwards incentives in the farm bills. Then there is the issue of rehabilitating a farm to take it "organic" (I'm conflating things here, antibiotics and organic farming aren't completely the same but similar) it takes years and capital to go clean, not all farmers have the resources to do it; they and the communities around them have a vested interest in declaring their methods safe and it becomes hyper political...

gregpilling• 12 years ago

Interesting article. The farmer that requires visitors to shampoo, probably has very few visitors.

vanderZwan2• 12 years ago

I dunno, if it's a pig farmer I'd take that as a signal it will be a cleaner place than expected.

ht_th• 12 years ago

It is about visiting the inner farm, so to speak. You can visit farms all you like, but once you come in close contact with animals, i.e., go into the animal barn, you're supposed to clean. The inner farms never had much visitors, especially in the industrial scale farming. Those who would visit anyway, vets, workers, maybe colleagues or students, will not have a problem with thorough cleaning, I suppose.

rurounijones• 12 years ago

One of the things that stood out for me was the emphasis on transparency when comparing farms and vets together based on their use of antibiotics.

Without that transparency I think it would fail.

Qantourisc• 12 years ago

I'm from Belgium, and I didn't see this article anywhere in my newspapers :/ Keep up the good work HN :)

dwightgunning• 12 years ago

In my experience living here, it's not only the farmers. Dutch doctors typically avoid prescribing general antibiotics (or advising anything stronger than paracetamol) to people.

rejschaap4• 12 years ago

The article mentions this. There was this twisted situation in Netherlands where doctors avoided antibiotics as much as possible. At the same time farmers were using more antibiotics than necessary. The latter effectively undoes the effort of Dutch doctors to keep resistance to antibiotics low.

Cthulhu_4• 12 years ago

Yeah, definite cultural difference from, for example, the US. But I'm pretty sure doctors there get money and gifts and whatnot from the pharmaceutical industry to supply large quantities of heavy pain killers.

junto2• 12 years ago

My wife's cousin owns a dairy farm in Germany and only uses homeopathic medicines on the cows. When I stifled a chuckle, he indignantly pointed out that not only does it appear to work for his cows, it isn't as if the cows can understand him, nor know that they are being treated.

However much I have my doubts about homeopathy, his cows seemed healthy and weren't being pumped full of antibiotics; hence I saw it as a good thing.

RyanMcGreal2• 12 years ago

Homeopathy "works" because most illnesses are self-limiting. For example, homeopathics appear to treat the common cold successfully, with the caveat that they take about a week or two to take effect.

octagonal• 12 years ago

This is basically how homeopathy become popular in the first place. It worked better than what was currently available in regular medicine because it didn't work at all.

opinali• 12 years ago

s/paracetamol/acetaminophen for US readers, who wouldn't know what paracetamol is. (Both names for the same drug)

mverwijs3• 12 years ago

The thing that jumps out at me from the article is the sheer size of 'the broiler farm that 160.000 chickens call home.'

If anything this article makes me feel ashamed for being Dutch.

tirant• 12 years ago

Why? Those chickens are living in much better conditions that others in chicken farms all around the world.

mverwijs3• 12 years ago

The fact that others are worse off does not in any way help the horrible predicament these chickens are in.

Synaesthesia• 12 years ago

It's not ideal, but if you look at how chickens are usually farmed, it's in the dark, in wire cages stacked on top of each other this is much better! Battery cages are completely unsanitary, the birds are covered in shit the whole time and can easily get injured, and much more stressful than this.

rejschaap4• 12 years ago

Yeah, these chickens are healthy, they might even be happy there. They could do a lot worse. If someone really doesn't like the idea of broiler farm chickens, they can pay a little extra for free range chickens. Or pay even more to buy them off a local farmer. Or just switch to something else entirely, there are plenty of alternatives available today.

facepalm• 12 years ago

You might enjoy reading "Eating Animals".

txutxu2• 12 years ago

Nice to read this.

Now.

There is no enough meat farmers in the Netherlands, to produce all the meat consumed _daily_ in the Netherlands.

I´ve been living and working there. I'm a meat lover. The Netherlands is the Hell for a person with the same tastes than me (many years of high quality meat and vegetables and cooking practices).

Meat in the Netherlands is of very bad quality and very high price (I will avoid more colloquial expressions of my basic english).

In those countries that dutch people call "monkeys" or "Moroccans" (this is, portugal, spain, italy and greece) the meat is much better in quality and price... but... we don't have the "autosuggestion" of "we are the best" than dutch people have (even with their street reality).

I don't trust news years ago, but I trust my experience.

The pseudo-nazi dutch people (the first place in the world where I did meet black-skin-nazis, gay-nazis, jew-nazis, etc), are very prone to believe, say and sell, that they are the best, this news are very well crafted for their mind, I don't want to live on a country with the meat quality and price of the Netherlands streets. I know the reality there.

I prefer to be a "Moroccan monkey discriminated european" for them, and take meat and tomatoes of the mountains of my not so auto-suggested, auto-inclined, people. And live with the bad reality (and crafted news) of my country.

Enjoy the meal, and sleep on ignorance and discriminatory abundance, and justify yourself your incoherent reality, dear dutch people.

wobbleblob3• 12 years ago

This post is actually one of the most positive reviews of Dutch food I have ever seen =)

txutxu2• 12 years ago

Well, it may seem positive, but here in the inferior south, that photos could destroy the day of many (sub)people.

We prefer animals and tomatoes not grow in those conditions shown in the photos (we get them, at the same prices, but grow with space and natural food).

I don't know why the article does not talk about the technologies used to modify vegetables and animals. I don't care if they don't get antibiotics, while they are transgenics, clones, or grow with irradiation and other technologies.

Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement

rejschaap4• 12 years ago

Haha, Dutch food can be quite bland if you are not used to it. I'm Dutch myself and my Chinese friends are pretty shocked at my eating habits, they even go so far to claim that I don't know how to live. But I genuinely enjoy some whole wheat bread with hard cheese or a Stamppot.

Luckily there are plenty alternatives as there are restaurants from every imaginable culture or country. Dutch people are still quite open-minded and open to other cultures. Maybe not as much as in the past, which is a shame.

Cthulhu_4• 12 years ago

You're generalising the Dutch as right-winged neo-nazi extremist racists there, I don't agree. That's just a few political outliers that try to get votes via extreme statements.

ordinary• 12 years ago

This is not the place. Your post is irrelevant to the topic at hand, is itself guilty of overgeneralization, and contains not just one but a whole series of political statements of the type that originate flamewars. A favourable reading (ignoring the parts that go flagrantly against either the style guide or the community standards) reduces your post to 'nice to read this', which is contentless. Please stop.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

Hi there. As a Dutch person I sympathize with your frustration, but just like the majority of the Dutch do not generalize like you describe I'd appreciate it if you did not generalize either. Because by generalizing like that you are positioning yourself more like the percentage of the Dutch that I'd rather not associate with than the rest of us, effectively making yourself part of the problem, not part of the solution.

That said I fully agree that this society needs to work on a lot of things such as immigration, all kinds of glass ceilings, discrimination (in fact, not on paper) and a ton of other aspects in which we are far from perfect. We used to be a fairly tolerant society and in the last decade or so have thrown away long term progress for some cheap political slogans and finger pointing. A single party is responsible for a lot of this and has successfully driven a wedge into our otherwise tolerant society.

This is a fairly common element historically, whenever there is some degree of trouble it can pay off politically to find a scape-goat. But please continue to see it for what it is: an appeal to the baser nature of those that are not smart enough to see through it and judge the rest of us by our actions rather than by the words of our co-citizens.

Thank you.

Confusion2• 12 years ago

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest bigot of them all?

You seem prejudiced, narrow minded and borderline delusional.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

Or just simply very frustrated at recent events in his/her life.

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

As the article says, the routine use of hormones and antibiotics for livestock has been banned for almost a decade in Europe.

What scares me is that with the new trade deal currently being hammered out between the EU and the US, there is a lot of pressure to "harmonize" the regulations, meaning the US will demand their chlorine-rinsed chicken, and hormone/antibiotics filled beef be allowed in the european markets.

koyote• 12 years ago

meaning the US will demand their chlorine-rinsed chicken, and hormone/antibiotics filled beef be allowed in the european markets.

Is there no chance of it being the other way around?

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

There is a possibility that some authority in the US will (be lobbied to) require hormones/chlorine-rinsing/antibiotics in order for the food to be deemed safe for American consumers, yes. So sadly, there needs to be some "harmonization" meaning turning the clock back a couple of decades in Europe.

relampago2• 12 years ago

Only way to stop that is for the consumer to not allow it to happen.

ep103• 12 years ago

Poor people have to buy cheap food. So that is not a real option.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 12 years ago

You realize that beef, being a large mammal and all, already has hormones in it regardless of whether they're artificial or not?

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 12 years ago

Wow, my most downvoted comment yet, and for pointing out that cows have hormones in them.

I guess the downvoters believe that the artificial variety are magically different from the natural sort, despite being chemically and biologically indistinguishable.

snake_plissken• 12 years ago

Wait, what, chlorine-rinsed chicken?

pcrh• 12 years ago

This refers to the practice of dipping freshly butchered chickens in chlorine to kill salmonella bacteria. In Europe they vaccinate the chickens instead.

pinaceae• 12 years ago

Use of anti-biotics for livestock has not been banned in Europe, where exactly do you get this info from?

The article talks about the Dutch stopping the use of anti-biotics as preventive measures, a practice where you feed animals antibiotics so that they cannot get sick in the first place. Once the animal is sick, they can still be treated with AB.

And to clear something up: Organic-labeled beef in the US is AB free, you can only label beef organic if no antibiotics were used full stop. Germany? Organic beef is allowed to have been treated with AB.

The world of food and animal safety is not as black and white as you might think. The FDA has instilled some pretty harsh rules that have not been adopted in the EU.

Same goes with cars btw, the rules on Diesel emissions are ways stricter in the US, etc. Different safety standards as well.

alkonaut5• 12 years ago

Use of anti-biotics for livestock has not been banned in Europe, where exactly do you get this info from?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#E...

(And by Europe I meant the EU) Sadly, not all countries seem to respect the ban.

rollthehard62• 12 years ago

In a potentially related story, BBC News reports a 300% increase in 10 years of younger prople being admitted with Crohn's Disease. Got it at 38 myself and, like others I suspect my exposure to large doses of antiobiotics may have contributed (For adult acne in my case - it's thought antibiotics deplete bacteria in the digestive tract which can lead to IBD following an infection, mine kicked off after food poisoning)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/27810066

jp555• 12 years ago

You could just as likely be looking at it backwards.

Could it just be a 300% increase due to 1000% increase in testing?

It's not really surprising; our brains are profoundly good at finding patterns, even when there are none.

rollthehard62• 12 years ago

It's quite possible IBD is just better diagnosed and patients are more aware of it yes. Myself I've been on Low Dose Naltrexone, more accurately, a low dose of Naltreone for 4 years and am asymptomatic, though I still have mildly active disease. The whole topic of OGF/Met-enkephalin is a fascinating one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met-enkephalin

And I agree, yes, there are many factors that contribute to auto-immune disease development both genetic and environmental.

junto2• 12 years ago

Curious. I have a related disease (Ulcerative Colitis) and I believe that the straw that broke the camel's back for me was also a course of antibiotics. I got ill also about the same age as you.

In retrospect, the initial "change" for me came years beforehand after a case of severe food poisoning. After that I struggled with certain foods; seafood for example made me instantly ill, whereas previous to the food poisoning incident I could handle almost any kind of food without issue.

I have recently seen an improvement in my UC after being prescribed with large doses of Vitamin D. I was suffering badly from exhaustion and fatigue, related to the side effects of UC and the medication I have to take against it. In combination with lots of foods that help with the intestinal flora, such as yogurts and pro-biotics (Yakult) I'm feeling much more healthy.

I don't think that one single thing causes these kinds of illnesses. I think it is a combination of factors that come together in a perfect storm. Genetics, stress, tiredness, diet and then damage to the intestinal flora (processed food / antibiotics) I think are all factors.

ugk• 12 years ago

Great idea until people start going hungry.

pmr_• 12 years ago

Apparently those measures have not had an negative effect on productivity in the Netherlands, so I do not see where you are coming from.

And you are also forgetting that this is done to prevent the spread of life-threatening diseases for which we do not have a working treatment yet and the emergence of new diseases of that kind.

Those are hard problems. Hunger in the first world is not (we already overproduce any kind of food) and even if meat would become scarce we could just use a fraction of the resources which are now used to raise livestock to feed ourselves.

The Abstinence Method – Dutch farmers say no to antibiotics for livestock

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