NYT "Power Steer" article (continued)
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.
The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a two-lane
highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding tractor-trailers
carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling
gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a
notch up from shanty. These are, presumably, the homes of the Mexican and
Asian immigrants who make up a large portion of the plant's work force. The
meat business has made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of
the country.
A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant
worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an alley that
makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute
becomes a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and then
disappears through a blue door.
That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to let
me go. I could see whatever I wanted to farther on -- the cold room where
carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the
carcasses are broken down into cuts -- on the condition that I didn't take pictures
or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off
limits to a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.
What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes mostly
from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact, helped to
design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State, is
one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry. She has
devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more
humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and
stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has allowed her to see
the world from the cow's point of view. The industry has embraced Grandin's
work because animals under stress are not only more difficult to handle but also
less valuable: panicked cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat
dark and unappetizing. ''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at a deep discount.
Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National Beef
plant; she has also audited the plant's killing process for McDonald's. Stories
about cattle ''waking up'' after stunning only to be skinned alive prompted
McDonald's to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited with substantial
improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin says that in cattle slaughter
''there is the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and
day.''
Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he passes
through the blue door. ''The animal goes into the chute single file,'' she began.
''The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him.
As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either
side. While he's straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree
angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground and he's being carried
along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and see
he's off the ground. That would panic him.''
Listening to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't help wondering what
No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any inkling --
a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line -- that this was no ordinary
day?
Grandin anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's going to get
slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into the squeeze
chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up the ramp at a slaughter
plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die, you'd see much more
agitated behavior.
''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along ...
(see next post)
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