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POWER
STEERING: THE BIONIC COW
 Poky
Feeders, population 37,000.
Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals
standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it eventually
dawns on you isn't mud at all. .
by Michael
Pollan,
Exract of article in NYTimes
SickofDoctors.com
21st April 2002
My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures
alongside his mother, No. 9,534. Born last March 13 in a
birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned out on pasture
with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and began
nursing.
 Apart
from the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated,
you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months
grazing at his mother's side as the good old days -- if, that
is, cows do look back. It may be foolish to presume to know what
a cow experiences, yet we can say that a cow grazing on grass
is at least doing what he has been splendidly molded by evolution
to do. Which isn't a bad definition of animal happiness. Eating
grass, however, is something that, after October, my steer would
never do again.
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Although the modern
cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal relationship
between cows and grass is one of nature's underappreciated wonders.
For the grasses, the cow maintains their habitat by preventing
trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads
grass seed, planting it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In
exchange for these services, the grasses offer the ruminants a
plentiful, exclusive meal. For cows, sheep and other grazers have
the unique ability to convert grass -- which single-stomached
creatures like us can't digest -- into high-quality protein. They
can do this because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon fermentation
tank in which a resident population of bacteria turns grass into
metabolically useful organic acids and protein.
This is an excellent
system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals and
for us. What's more, growing meat on grass can make superb ecological
sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it
is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land
too arid or hilly to grow anything else.
So if this system
is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't tasted a blade of grass
since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take
longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer
diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening
a beef calf's allotted time on earth. ''In my grandfather's day,
steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,'' explained Rich Blair,
who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four years. ''In
the 50's, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get
there at 14 to 16 months.'' Fast food indeed.
What gets a beef
calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities
of corn, protein supplements -- and drugs, including growth hormones.
These ''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have transformed
raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not
everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair
told me, ''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.''
Weaning marks the
fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic represented
by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial
logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a box
of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible
-- after all, it has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury
item into everyday fare for millions of people. And yet the further
you follow it, the more likely you are to wonder if that rational
logic might not also be completely insane.
In early October,
a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his mother.
Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals
and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope
and bellow for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the
change in circumstance and diet, are prone to get sick.
On many ranches,
weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale barn, where
they're sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The Blairs
prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and to
keep them on the ranch for a couple of months of ''backgrounding''
before sending them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders. Think
of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals
are confined in a pen, ''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a
trough -- and gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural
diet of grain. (Grazing cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain,
in the form of grass seeds.)
It was in the backgrounding
pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably warm afternoon
in November. I'd told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their
steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I might as well
buy a steer, as a way to really understand the daunting economics
of modern ranching. Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad,
straight back and thick hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong
frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a
memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one that would stand out
in the feedlot crowd. Almost as soon as I started surveying the
90 or so steers in the pen, No. 534 moseyed up to the railing
and made eye contact. He had a wide, stout frame and was brockle-
faced -- he had three distinctive white blazes. If not for those
markings, Ed said, No. 534 might have been spared castration and
sold as a bull; he was that good-looking. But the white blazes
indicate the presence of Hereford blood, rendering him ineligible
for life as an Angus stud. Tough break.
My second morning
on the ranch, I helped Troy Hadrick, Ed's son-in-law and a ranch
hand, feed the steers in the backgrounding pen.
A thickly muscled post of a man, Hadrick is 25 and wears a tall
black cowboy hat perpetually crowned by a pair of mirrored Oakley
sunglasses. He studied animal science at South Dakota State and
is up on the latest university thinking on cattle nutrition, reproduction
and medicine. Hadrick seems to relish everything to do with ranching,
from calving to wielding the artificial-insemination syringe.
Hadrick and I squeezed
into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor hooked up
to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant screw through
the middle to blend ingredients. First stop was a hopper filled
with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume
with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have
no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're
placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why?
The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the
feed. The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the
cow's digestive process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it
can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by
antibiotics.
After we'd scooped
the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer, Hadrick
deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a switch
to release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line. No.
534 was one of the first animals to belly up to the rail for breakfast.
He was heftier than his pen mates and, I decided, sparkier too.
That morning, Hadrick and I gave each calf six pounds of corn
mixed with seven pounds of ground alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound
of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this ration would be cranked
up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay -- and added two and
a half pounds every day to No. 534.
To travel from
the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I both did (in separate
vehicles) the first week in January, feels a lot like going from
the country to the big city. Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind
of city, populated by as many as 100,000 animals. It is very much
a premodern city, however -- crowded, filthy and stinking, with
open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air.
The urbanization
of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical development,
so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would
recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century
London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display:
the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly,
there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from who knows
where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation. This combination
has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary
animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts
is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.
I spent the better
part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to understand
how its various parts fit together. In any city, it's easy to
lose track of nature -- of the connections between various species
and the land on which everything ultimately depends. The feedlot's
ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn. But its food chain
doesn't end there, because the corn itself grows somewhere else,
where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships.
Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in
this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which
in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every
bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea
of oil.
I started my tour
at the feed mill, the yard's thundering hub, where three meals
a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer. A
million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day. Every
hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another
25 tons of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks
back up to silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of
gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplement. In a shed attached
to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen;
next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin
and tylosin, another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn
silage for roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then
piped into the dump trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles
of trough filled.
The feed mill's great
din is made by two giant steel rollers turning against each other
12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into flakes. This
was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn't half bad;
not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a cornier flavor. I passed,
however, on the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting
of molasses and urea.
Corn is a mainstay
of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap
or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses,
the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost
of growing it. The rise of the modern factory farm is a direct
result of these surpluses, which soared in the years following
World War II, when petrochemical fertilizers came into widespread
use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has been to help farmers
dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through
the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into protein.
Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff,
making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small
plots of land. Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization of
livestock would probably never have occurred.
We have come to think
of ''cornfed'' as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn't.
Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it
a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet
this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains
more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of
Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock
not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that
the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier.
(Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6,
which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine
and CLA, another ''good'' fat.) A growing body of research suggests
that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are
really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have
not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating
grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.'s grading system continues
to reward marbling -- that is, intermuscular fat -- and thus the
feeding of corn to cows.
The economic logic
behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm, there is no
other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most
convenient source of calories. Of course the identical industrial
logic -- protein is protein -- led to the feeding of rendered
cow parts back to cows, a practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after
scientists realized it was spreading mad-cow disease.
Make that mostly
banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against feeding ruminant protein to
ruminants make exceptions for ''blood products'' (even though
they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined
on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading
to in June. ''Fat is fat,'' the feedlot manager shrugged when
I raised an eyebrow.
F.D.A. rules still
permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to cows. (Feather
meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish protein and
chicken manure.) Some public-health advocates worry that since
the bovine meat and bone meal that cows used to eat is now being
fed to chickens, pigs and fish, infectious prions could find their
way back into cattle when they eat the protein of the animals
that have been eating them. To close this biological loophole,
the F.D.A. is now considering tightening its feed rules.
Until mad-cow disease,
remarkably few people in the cattle business, let alone the general
public, comprehended the strange semicircular food chain that
industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in turn, for
us). When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I'd been surprised to
learn that cows were eating cows, he said, ''To tell the truth,
it was kind of a shock to me too.'' Yet even today, ranchers don't
ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not that the answers are
so easy to come by. When I asked Poky's feedlot manager what exactly
was in the protein supplement, he couldn't say. ''When we buy
supplement, the supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but they
don't specify beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it wouldn't
divulge all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised that
animal parts weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still
protein.
Compared with ground-up
cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it wreaks considerable
havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at Poky, I spent an hour
or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff
veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas State's vet school,
oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their days riding the
yard, spotting sick cows and bringing them in for treatment. A
great many of their health problems can be traced to their diet.
''They're made to eat forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're making
them eat grain.''
Perhaps the most
serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot
bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which
is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the
diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination
all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms
in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against
the animal's lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve
the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus),
the cow suffocates.
A corn diet can also
give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs,
the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally
acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in
some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick.
Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively,
paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea,
ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune
system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia
to feedlot polio.
Cows rarely live
on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about
as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. ''I don't know
how long you could feed this ration before you'd see problems,''
Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would
eventually ''blow out their livers'' and kill them. As the acids
eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and
collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are
found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.
What keeps a feedlot
animal healthy -- or healthy enough -- are antibiotics. Rumensin
inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat;
tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the
antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed -- a practice
that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the
evolution of new antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.'' In the debate
over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually
made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates
don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just
don't want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory
farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But
the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction.
Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet
the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for what we feed
them.
I asked Metzen what
would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. ''We
just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he said. ''Or we'd have a higher
death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.)
The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system
would have to slow down.
''Hell, if you gave
them lots of grass and space,'' he concluded dryly, ''I wouldn't
have a job.''
Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534,
I stopped by the shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone
implants. The calves are funneled into a chute, herded along
by a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a
restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a slow-release
pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear.
The Blairs' pen had not yet been implanted, and I was still struggling
with the decision of whether to forgo what is virtually a universal
practice in the cattle industry in the United States. (It has
been banned in the European Union.)
American regulators
permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health
has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn
up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic
compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may
explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls.
Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth
hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually
wind up in the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists
have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
The F.D.A. is opening
an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting hormones
in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an implant
costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of
a steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25. That could
easily make the difference between profit and loss on my investment
in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding
my son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like
a cattleman, there was really no decision to make.
I asked Rich Blair
what he thought. ''I'd love to give up hormones,'' he said. ''If
the consumer said, We don't want hormones, we'd stop in a second.
The cattle could get along better without them. But the market
signal's not there, and as long as my competitor's doing it, I've
got to do it, too.''
Around lunch time,
Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's pen. My first impression
was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of real estate.
The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and
it has a water view -- of what I initially thought was a reservoir,
until I noticed the brown scum. The pen itself is surprisingly
spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with a concrete
feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed
over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated
a few steps, then paused.
I had on the same
carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the ranch in South Dakota,
hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off in the back, I spotted
him -- those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped toward
him, the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted,
and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly at each other. Glint
of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it
personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all,
not his intellect.
I don't know enough
about the emotional life of cows to say with any confidence if
No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I would not say
he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a little bloodshot.
Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the
feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he
fixed me. Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating
well. My animal had put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd
last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round
as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a
steer now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year
old. Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's
a handsome looking beef you've got there.'' (Aw, shucks.)
Staring at No. 534,
I could picture the white lines of the butcher's chart dissecting
his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket.
One way of looking at No. 534 -- the industrial way -- was as
an efficient machine for turning feed corn into beef. Every day
between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert
32 pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half
pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap
raw materials into a less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely
possible.
Yet the factory metaphor
obscures as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before
me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal
in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals,
plants and microbes, as well as to the earth. And one of those
other animals is us. The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has
compromised No. 534's health is fattening his flesh in a way that
in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat him.
The antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very
moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment
they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist
the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem
as the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens
to us.
I thought about the
deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don't
know much about the hormones in it -- where they will end up or
what they might do once they get there -- but we do know something
about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably
resided in the manure beneath my feet. Escherichia coli 0157 is
a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was
first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot cattle,
more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few
as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.
Most of the microbes
that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food
get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally
adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive
tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own,
and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of
E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and
go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have
broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection. Yet
this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist,
has discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in
the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli
0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however,
is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.
So much comes back
to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be
not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's pen, a dump truck
pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream
of feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The
$1.60 a day I'm paying for three giant meals is a bargain only
by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account,
for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance
or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated
with industrial corn.
For if you follow
the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you
will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical
herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you
can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down
the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created
(if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''
But you can go farther
still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all
the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started
life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from
the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his
food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered
by fossil fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military -- another
uncounted cost of ''cheap'' food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell
ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might
be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to
grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues
to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds,
he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil.
We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming
what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing
we need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though
only 14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds
and will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese.
One morning, a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in
Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load
No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.
Extracted from Power
Steering NYTimes Magazine
 SickofDoctors.com
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