
High price of corn forcing farmers to feed candy to livestock - ggasp
http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/ky-state-news/High-price-of-corn-forcing-farmers-to-feed-candy-to-livestock-166004506.html
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jack-r-abbit
IANAFarmer but I grew up on a farm (not a commercial one... just for family
needs) and we routinely fed our pigs what ever we could get from the "Day Old
Bakery" when it was too old/damaged even for them. While a good portion of it
was usually just old bread, it was not uncommon for half a truck load to be
entirely made up of smashed fruit pies and donuts. Our pork always tasted
good. I would not be too concerned with eating meat from a cow that was raised
on a regulated diet of chocolate and supplements.

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Qworg
Cows will eat most anything. It doesn't mean they should.

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slurgfest
What is your concern about the cow eating old chocolate?

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Qworg
Nothing specifically about chocolate. Any non-grass diet is demonstrably worse
for the cows in overall health and final meat quality.

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bunderbunder
I imagine developing heart disease or diabetes later in life isn't
particularly high on the list of concerns for beef cattle, considering they're
sent to slaughter at a fraction of their natural life span.

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tzs
The problem isn't that cows might get heart disease if they were allowed to
live into old age. The problem is that these bad diets make them sick while
young, often requiring that they be pumped full of medicine to be "healthy"
enough to be eligible for slaughter. This affects the quality (culinary and
nutritional) of the meat for humans.

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bunderbunder
That's not because of the diet, that's because of the crowded and unsanitary
nature of conditions in CAFOs.

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RexM
I read the article, hoping the farmer was feeding the cattle Candy Corn :(

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ryandvm
Wow - Idiocracy was such a prophetic movie. Just waiting for the news that
we're hydrating crops with Brawndo.

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slurgfest
You would rather that food unsuitable for human consumption were thrown out to
rot rather than feeding livestock?

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zzzeek
real food is compostable, allowing it to contribute right back to the food
production system.

I'm not sure if this applies to stale Fruit Loops though. I certainly don't
want them anywhere near my food supply.

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thedangler
Hmmm, why don't they feed them grass? Isn't that what they are supposed to be
eating? I'm no farmer, honest question.

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knieveltech
You've got ranchers in places like Wyoming where the forage is barely
sufficient to keep livestock alive. Cattle raised under these conditions have
to be fattened up before they can be sent to a slaughterhouse. Typically these
cows will be shipped to another ranch that specializes in this before then
being shipped to market. It sounds like the guy quoted in the article is
running one of these secondary "fattening" ranches.

Since grain (or in this case candy) has a much higher energy content than
grass, cattle can be raised to market weight much faster than if they were fed
a grass diet.

Edit: I accidentally a word.

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juniorplenty
"Ranch" isn't really what we're talking about here; cattle are sent from
ranches to feed lots for fattening (which is what this guy is running, hence
the ability to gin up new chemi-food on site.)

Feed lots are very highly concentrated populations of cattle that are fed a
regulated diet of grain (corn) mixed with concentrated antibiotics and, in
this case, rotten chocolate. Another commenter already referenced Pollan's
work, which exposes the tradeoffs of this industrialized approach. Among these
are increased e.coli outbreaks (as e.coli concentrate in the rumen of the cow
when it tries to digest grain,) and the increased likelihood of antibiotic-
resistent bacteria developing because of the tremendous amount of antibiotics
used to keep animals living in these conditions from getting sick:

[http://www.oklahomafarmreport.com/wire/news/2010/07/media/00...](http://www.oklahomafarmreport.com/wire/news/2010/07/media/00359_cattle-
feedlot-002.jpg)

(That ankle-deep black stuff is poo, which also runs and collects in giant
sewer pools that generate toxic runoff.)

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knieveltech
Just so. Feed lot was the term I was looking for but couldn't remember. Thanks
for providing clarification.

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rmason
In Michigan this is not that unusual. I worked in the fertilizer industry as
an agronomist. I have routinely seen animals fed cereal (Kellogg's and Post
are headquartered here), day old bread and even cupcakes.

As long as the overall ration is balanced it doesn't make a difference in the
final product.

<http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/compute/balance.htm>

FWIW I bought my dad (who was a feed salesman) a TI programmable calculator in
the seventies that used magnetic strips to run programs and wrote him a feed
balancing ration program. Far as we know he was the only one in the world at
the time who had a hand held ration balancer!

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typicalrunt
Feeding your cattle a mixture of second-hand chocolate, ethanol by-products
and minerals doesn't sound very tasty, from this beef consumer's point of
view. There is the saying of "you are what you eat" and I wonder if any of
those flavours will come out in the final product.

But more importantly, IANAFarmer, but I don't understand why cattle need to be
fat in order to be profitable. Don't the farmers want their cattle to have
high protein/muscle content versus high fat content?

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ChuckMcM
Beef cows are sold 'by the pound' so farmers look at the cost of adding pounds
to the price per pound and solve for the greatest $.

As for the feed vs the taste, I literally put chicken shit on the ground my
tomatoes are growing in and it makes them both larger and tastier. Biological
transformation is a magical thing in many ways.

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jetti
"As for the feed vs the taste, I literally put chicken shit on the ground my
tomatoes are growing in and it makes them both larger and tastier. Biological
transformation is a magical thing in many ways."

But you don't put chicken shit IN your tomatoes!

I wonder how it makes the cows feel after eating it, e.g do they know the
difference or is it like when my dog eats something off the sidewalk when I'm
not looking and then mopes around for the rest of the day 'cause she doesn't
feel well.

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mikeash
He's putting the fertilizer in the tomatoes exactly as much as these guys are
putting candy in cows. In both cases, the material is presented to the
organism which then takes it in on its own.

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zzzeek
the comments here are unsurprising, I guess it's just an outrageous notion to
suggest that eating meat may expose us to at least some aspects of what the
animal was fed all its life (which may just as well mean an insufficient level
of necessary nutrients, as much as it may mean exposure to negative
substances).

Here's a PDF from the Union of Concerned Scientists, just regarding the
potential dietary advantages of grass fed beef:
[http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_environment/...](http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_environment/greener-
pastures.pdf) The concept of "we're affected by what the cow eats" isn't
novel. Eating meat that was raised on candy or fruit loops is revolting.

