[Jacob-list] Grain vs. grazing

[Grose]

Hi Betty and all.
I thought that I had pretty much run through this subject. Saturday morning, People's Pharmacy on NPR had a guest on that touched on what we have been talking about here. The author wrote a book called It Probably Was Something You Ate that dealt with food borne illnesses. She discussed, in part, that how animals are raised affects the bacteria load that is carried to the kitchen. One caller was a grass-fed beef producer who commented on how the really bad bugs [E. coli strain 05something] tolerate acid better and therefore pass along through the food chain. Grain fed cattle have more acidic rumens because of the lack of buffering from fiber and therefore have brought this on. There is a lot of truth to this, but it is one of those "yea but things". Things are always more complicated than we would like. As a dairy farmer, my thinking is not so much that grain is bad or that grazing does not support enough production, but rather to focus on the total ration that we provide to the animals. In reality, lush grazing can cause rumen acidosis. Our consumers do not tolerate tough meat or fleeces with breaks due to poor nutrition, regardless of how much Omega-3 fatty acid they have. I feel that one thing we need to be careful about though is portraying traditional agriculture as the bad guy. Turning consumers off meat and eggs does not turn them on to us. Our food supply is safe. There is a $10,000 fine for knowingly sending an animal contaminated with antibiotics to market. I think that it is dumb to feed animals antibiotics as growth inducers; but, the ones that are being used for this are not used extensively on people. Getting back to the author: I liked what she said in conclusion at the end of the program. She said that much of the problem is that we expect food to be too cheap in this country, and consumers are too far removed from our food supply in this country.

Neal Grose
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