I’ve posted previously how the debate on the Mackenzie Basin should be more about the huge potential damage that would be done by turning it into dairy farms than putting cows into feedlots.
I’m now revisiting that issue. The spark has been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by American author Michael Pollan. He describes buying a calf from a prairie ranch in South Dakota and following it to a Kansas feedlot.
It is a sickening story. Four out of five American beef cattle are now reared on feedlots, usually after having had their first few months of life out on a ranch where they get to eat their natural food – grass. When about six months old, they are shipped to a feedlot and taught how to eat corn. Because cows’ stomachs are designed to digest grass, they need to be given huge quantities of antibiotics to help them cope with corn, grown with huge American taxpayer subsidies.
Oh and the feed mix includes beef tallow (fat), so they are eating their own. Remember how mad cow disease took hold because animals were eating their own species. The mix also includes estrogen, the female hormone. This astounded me.
My father farmed pigs in Wales for five years after WW2. His best mate Stan went to Canada and returned with stories about the quality of life there. He boasted over dinner how he was eating chicken three times a week – unheard of in post-war Britain.
Later, after a couple of whiskies, Stan confided to Dad that there was one downside to life in Canada; he had completely lost his sex drive. Dad thought about that for a while and then suggested it might be linked to eating estrogen-pumped chicken.
Three months later he got a letter from Stan. He said he’d given up chicken and he was back in working order! Yet here we are 50 years later, with North American food still being pumped with estrogen.
Next post. How we have no certainty about the safety of some of our own food.
Oooh, that’s terrible!
This has to be stopped. 
When will people learn?
Thankyou for for these posts.
We’re don’t realise how lucky we are in New Zealand. Omnivores dilemma is a good book. I also recommend ‘my year of meat’ – along similar lines but follows a woman making a tv cooking show promoting american beef to Japanese housewives who decides she should know the story of the meat she’s promoting. She meets a guy in Louisiana who developed breasts and lost facial hair etc because he was eating chicken necks and presumably the estrogen concentrated in the thyroid gland.
I’ve seen photos of those feedlots.Shocking.Same go’s for pigs and chickens .Not even much point turning vegetarian as they get you through genetically modified seed and chemical fertilisers and everything else they do to “food”.
Put it down to greed.
My god! Imagine all those Americans suddenly getting their sex-drives back similtaneously! What is the rest of the world do to? Throw more chickens at them!
LOL
I really loved The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It really opened my eyes to the cattle industry in the US and how lucky we are in NZ to have the vast majority of our beef grass-fed. I may not be a vegetarian, but I do like to know that my mince or steak hasn’t been living and sleeping in a layer of excrement 30cm deep for most of their lives. This is another reason they need to pump all the drugs into the cattle feed. But the thing is – they were only fed corn in the first place to get rid of the monumental stockpile of corn that they have. In the early 70s, the Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz encouraged overproduction, and instead of holding any excess away, to dump it on the market. Any person with a rudimentary knowledge of economics knows that flooding the market will drive prices down, and it has reached a point where it now costs more to grow a bushel of corn then to buy it. The only reason why farmers can make a living (while being up to their eyeballs in debt) is through government subsidies. Without the intervention of Mr Butz, the corn farmers and the cows would be better off. There wouldn’t be any HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) either, as that was another way to get rid of as much corn as possible. Anyway, I urge you to read TOD and to see Food Inc and King Corn – they really open your eyes to the modern food industry.
“…how lucky we are in NZ to have the vast majority of our beef grass-fed…”
But does anyone know what percentage of these grass fed cows are completely grass fed? Or are they “finished off” for market or milk production, with grain (corn)
Here in NZ over a million tonnes of grain is imported to feed cattle…so some of them are obviously being fed corn…??!!
Corn production HFCS & the like, is big money & a total “cornspiracy”