Meat Production in the US

Repost from my MySpace blog

The US is the largest consumer of meat by far, and it is also the largest producer of meat. Most of the grazing animals used for meat are raised on rangeland west of the Mississippi. The use of rangeland takes up 788 million acres, [i]40 percent of the land in the lower 48 states, and over 70 percent of the land area of the western states. Over most of this area, the grazing animals have totally displaced native grazing animals and the predators that formerly inhabited the region have been wiped out.

The USDA Animal Damage Control Division (ADC) kills over 80,000 predators a year, including bears, wolves, and mountain lions, for the benefit of private ranchers. In addition, the ADC wiped out 2.7 million nuisance animals such as squirrels and raccoons. State agencies exterminate even more. The losses from predation to the cattle industry are estimated to by one fifth of one percent of the cattle herd. By contrast, losses due to respiratory problems alone in cattle account for 5 times as many pre-slaughter deaths.

Although out on the range eating grass is the natural habitat for a ruminant such as cattle, there simply is not enough space for them all if we are to consume as much meat as we do in the US. The population of cattle is sustained by artificial means. In the industrialized world of modern meat production, cattle have been reduced to a commodity and a means of converting excess grain production into cheap protein.

When one of the 107 million head of cattle in the US reaches a weight of about 650 lbs, it is taken to a feedlot for finishing. At the feedlot, known in industry terms as a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), the steer is forced to eat corn, soybean meal, even animal protein and waste products including poultry waste from broiler farms[ii], until he is literally bursting at the seams.

The number of cattle being raised has been increasing, but the number of farms and CAFOs have been decreasing. This is due to the growth of larger and larger CAFO factories. A moderate sized cattle feeding operation can handle over 30,000 head of cattle at one time. Feed and medicine is delivered by railcar and truckload around the clock. Much of the feed is mixed and processed right on site.

The consumption of corn by cattle, besides being unnatural, accounts for over half the corn grown in the US. A total of 80 million acres of corn is grown in the US, 7 million acres just for silage (chopped up and stored whole corn stalks) to feed dairy and beef cattle. Another 3 million acres of hay and alfalfa are grown for forage. This represents the product of 37 million acres of corn, or half the corn is harvested, is used for livestock feed.[iii]. Each head of cattle consumes about 1200 lbs of feed at the CAFO to produce 100 pounds of meat.

Corn is heavily subsidized, and is the cheapest source of calories for raising beef in a feedlot. Without subsidized corn, in fact, this process of raising cattle would probably not even exist. Since cattle did not evolve to eat grain, but grass, this diet causes bloating and sickness for the animals. It also causes the digestive system of the animal to become acidic.

The unnaturally acidic digestive system has caused other unforeseen problems for humans. This is because the steer are fed large quantities of antibiotics to maintain their health. The naturally occurring enteric bacteria in their gut has evolved recently to adapt to the acidic environment, giving rise to deadly strains of Escherichia Coli bacteria such as O157:H7 that can survive the trip through human stomachs and infect humans. This bacteria can live in the intestines of healthy cattle. The pathogen is usually introduced to the meat at slaughter because the cattle are covered with contaminated manure when brought to the slaughterhouse, or because the contents of the gut are spilled onto the meat.

Feeding a ruminant an unnatural diet of simple starches supplemented with protein, although causing immense gastric distress, causes the animal to gain weight very quickly. Much of this weight gain is in the form of intramuscular fat, or marbling. So besides being bad for the cow, it is bad for the consumer of the meat, due to the corresponding increase in saturated fat being taken in every bite. In order to maintain health of the animal, and to increase weight gain even more, the steer is fed or injected with antibiotics and steroids.

The steroid being fed the cow also end up in the fat and meat as well, and is a principal reason that hormone laced American beef is not allowed to be imported into European Union, and now even Switzerland is considering the same ban[iv].

The hormones used include oestradiol (estrogen), testosterone, progesterone, zeranol, trenbolone, and melegesterol acetate. Oestradiol is considered a cancer risk in humans. The use of sex hormones are indicated in causing early puberty in girls[v], and prostate cancer in men[vi]. The rate of breast cancer in the US is 50igher than that of women in Europe. The rate of prostate cancer in men is nearly 3 times higher in America than in France and 5 times higher than in Asia.[vii]

The mountainous quantity of manure that the feedlot cattle wade through for the last six months of their lives is teeming with deadly E. Coli and hazardous levels of hormones. This waste is then discharged into the environment, causing problems with aquatic systems, reducing fish populations by interfering with reproduction.

It is suspected that the practice of allowing cattle to be fed mechanically processed meat has led to the spread of mad-cow disease (BSE). This is because meat that is processed this way is forced under pressure from the spinal cord. This pressure can release pieces of spinal tissue into the meat. The brain and spinal tissue are suspected of carrying the prion that causes BSE.[viii]

For this reason, the USDA prohibited feeding beef back to cows in 1997. But it still allowable to feed blood products and beef fat and tallow to cattle. This practice still continues as a way of disposing of waste products from slaughterhouses. Since the late 90s, there is an increasing shift to using soy meal as a protein supplement for cattle, although the cost of soy has meal in comparison to waste products has slowed its use.

Soybeans are, however, a major crop used as livestock feed mostly for chickens and hogs. Most of the soybeans used are first processed to remove the oil; the pressed cake is then used as feed. Processed soy beans are feed to hogs and chickens in the form of concentrated animal feed, which is a combination of different ingredients to replace the natural diet of these animals. For the most part, production of hogs and chickens takes place in Confined Animal Feeding Operations in the US. This means that the animals spend their entire lives indoors.

Chickens are raised indoors by the thousands, often caged individually or five at a time in confinement with little room to move about. To prevent them from harming themselves or other chickens, the birds are often de-beaked, that is the upper 2/3 and lower 1/3 of their beaks are sheared off to prevent them from pecking their fellow cellmates. Often, to prevent the spread of diseases and to speed up growth, the feed is laced with antibiotics. The systematic use of antibiotics has been criticized because it could breed more resistant strains of bacteria and that the antibiotics could be present in the meat sold to consumers.

A total of 8.5 Billion chickens and turkeys are slaughtered in the US every year. This is roughly 4.6 Billion pounds live weight every month of slaughtered poultry. It takes a half-pound of feed for every egg produced. It takes 850 pounds of feed to produce 100 pounds live weight of chickens, and about 220 pounds of feed to produce 100 pounds of broilers, as a finished product. Each chicken consumed about 31 pounds of feed during its lifetime.

Hogs are increasingly being raised indoors the same as chickens. They are often confined indoors in pens their entire lives in these operations. A typical farm at one time had 100 hogs, now the typical farm has thousands of hogs. The number of hog farms has been reduced as the farm factories have grown. A typical sow in a factory farm never sees the light of day and rarely gets to leave a pen that does not even permit her to turn around.

Sow gestation crates, Courtesy Farm Sanctuary, © 2006.

This type of confinement practice has been outlawed in Europe and some states in the US. Even with confinement of sows, raising so many hogs in the same building requires that very small pens be used. Also, the pigs are not allowed to wallow in mud to cool themselves, and live on concrete floors. Water is periodically sprayed on the pigs to cool them in hot weather.

In fact, the breed of hogs being produced in the factory farms would not survive long outdoors, being lightly pigmented and nearly hairless.

The building that contains the hogs can be a hazardous place for humans. The level of dust and odor can be unbearable. Much of the odor is due to hazardous levels of ammonia from feces and urine, and hydrogen sulfide gas from manure pits. Hog confinement is particularly dangerous. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been linked to working conditions in these facilities, as well as bronchitis, asthma, and toxic organic dust syndrome. The Iowa State University Extension Service recommends workers wear respirators, including full helmet type respirators with an oxygen supply for long-term protection in this environment.[ix] No study has determined the effect on the animals imprisoned in the building.

The manure generated from CAFO and Factory farms is a major source of pollution. Every day, the 10 million hogs in North Carolina produce more sewage than New York City and its boroughs. Often, this sewage is kept in open lagoons for treatment before discharge into waterways. The odor produced has made ghost towns out of the downwind areas. Not a single farm, no matter the size, treats the sewage to the same level of treatment that a similar size city would be expected to. Lagoon spillage and the runoff from fields sprayed with hog waste has caused fish kills and contaminated drinking water in North Carolina.

Hog producers, realizing that support for polluting rivers and destroying small towns is fading, are now seeking government subsidies to try and solve the sewage disposal problem. According to the swine industry, it wouldnt be profitable to actually clean up the pollution it causes all by itself.[x]

[i] Major Uses of Land in the United States, 1997. By Marlow Vesterby and Kenneth S. Krupa. Resource Economics Division, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Statistical Bulletin No. 973.

[ii] Feeding Animal Wastes http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/004/X6518E/X6518E02.htm

[iii] Agricultural Statistics 2004, USDA

[iv] Switzerland Considers Ban on US Meat http://www.meatnews.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Article&artNum=12249

[v] Earlier Puberty in Girls linked to Beef Hormones http://www.organicconsumers.org/Toxic/hormoncancer.cfm

[vi] Environmental Clues to Prostate Cancer http://www.cacinfo.org/PROSTATE.htm

[vii] Prostate Cancer Epidemiology, National Cancer Institute, http://seer.cancer.gov/publications/prostate/

[viii] Meat Stripper Gets Third Degree http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/stripper11904.cfm

[ix] Livestock Confinement Dusts and Gases, Iowa State University Extension Service, 1992

[x] http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentID=5078

The bitter truth of ethanol

First posted in Spetember 2006 on Myspace

More and more frequently, there are references made in the press regarding ethanol and energy independence. Just the other day Thomas Friedman of the NY Times was informing his readers of the wonderful fact finding trip he took to Brazil to look into how they achieved energy independence. Brazil is often cited as an example of a country that through a combination of agriculture and industry, they achieved this remarkable goal. While Brazil has achieved energy independence to a large degree, the situation in South America is much different that the situation in the US.

For one thing, Brazil has improved its energy situation by making ethanol from sugar cane. Sugar cane is grown in sub-tropical areas, not the temperate regions such as the US. The only states that have any sugar industry to speak of is Louisiana and Florida. So even if more sugar cane could be grown in the lower 48, the question is, would we really want to grow it?

Sugar has several downsides to growing it on a large scale. The first is that it is relatively labor intensive, and relies on a large workforce of unskilled labor to maintain and especially harvest the crop. Most of this workforce is poorly paid, and the low wages are one thing that keeps Brazil's sugar production economical.

Besides this, sugar is known for depleting the soils it is grown on. There are huge tracts of land in the Caribbean Islands that once were sugar plantations and are now barren. Between the depleted soils and the loss of slave labor to harvest the sugar, these island plantations were forced to close.

In the U.S., there are documented health impacts from burning the cane crop before harvesting. This practice reduces the biomass that needs to hauled to the processing plant. It also make the canes easier to harvest. There are incidents of increased asthma and other health effects from being exposed to the smoke and ash from burning sugar cane fields. Brazil has been at the forefront of developing means to harvest green, unburnt, cane. This technology has not transferred to the US, a producers have been resistant to the increased cost of harvesting.

Furthermore, many of the supporters of Brazil's ability to meet domestic energy demands, including Mr. Freidman, leave out several important points.

Number one is that the US uses an astounding 20 times more gasoline than Brazil does per person. This means that Brazil had an easier time producing the 20 to 25 percent replacement of gasoline by ethanol that they achieved.

The second little noticed fact about Brazil is that it runs more on diesel fuel than gasoline. At least 53 percent of the motor fuel used in the country is diesel fuel. By contrast, the U.S. uses 4 times as much gasoline as diesel fuel. Brazil has not replaced this diesel fuel with biofuels, in fact, what they have done is increased domestic production of petroleum. A case could be made that the whole of the energy independence achieved by Brazil was through increased domestic oil production.

In total, about 10 percent of Brazil's transportation fuel needs measured on a net energy basis are derived from ethanol. In order to achieve this, the Brazilians are farming about 13 million acres of cropland. Any increase in this amount will mean that more rainforest acres must be logged and converted to cane fields. In fact, the cooler southern regions of Brazil where most of the cane is grown now can produce only one crop per year. If production is ramped up in the Amazon basin, two crops per year can be grown. This is a tempting prospect for farmers.

The other problems of cane growing, including water for irrigation, increased pesticide use, and centralization of production by agri-business, are repeated with the competitor for ethanol production in the US, corn farming.

But the problems associated with producing ethanol from corn don't just start down on the farm. Corn itself is not an ideal plant to produce ethanol from. The plant does not manufacture simple sugars or alcohol, these are produced by biological action on the corn mash by yeasts. This process yields a lower amount of ethanol return on the biomass used. The typical yield from a corn field in the US is about 130 bushels per acre. From this corn, about 370 gallons of ethanol can be produced. By comparison, the sugar cane in Brazil produces almost 600 gallons of ethanol per acre.

If all the 74 million acres of corn raised in the US were used to produce ethanol, this would mean a production of 27.4 Billion gallons of ethanol, which has the energy equivalent of 18 billion gallons of gasoline. At the rate we burn gasoline in the U.S., that supply would get us through less than two months.

In order to produce enough motor fuel to last all year, the corn farming families would have to multiply in number like Mormons, and the ethanol plants would need to spread like mushrooms on the bog. More that a quarter of the total land area of the contiguous U.S. would be needed to be planted in corn.

The presidents goal of increasing ethanol production by using new processes to derive fuel from plants such as switch grass is still a ways off. Unless some breakthrough is found, the process generally is acknowledged to be 10 years away from industrial production. In order to maintain interest in the development of this technology, ethanol demand, and prices, will have to remain high. In order to the ensure that ethanol use expands, the government has been subsidizing ethanol by giving tax incentives for its use.

States such as Minnesota hand out direct subsidies to ethanol producers to the tune of 20 cents per gallon, this has resulted in the payment of millions of dollars to plants that already produce enough ethanol to pay for themselves in one year. Even the startup cost for the plants are subsidized through economic development grant money to the tune of millions of dollars. In addition, the federal tax on fuel is a nickel less per gallon on 10 percent ethanol gas blend (E10) compared to pure gasoline. This price advantage, if passed on to the consumer, helps to spur demand.

Although many of the initial ethanol plants were started with a cooperative of farmers pooling resources and sharing risks, lately the larger players have moved in seeking a share of the burgeoning profits.

The agriculture giant Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) now controls 25 percent of ethanol production in the US. With increasing outside investment in ethanol production, this is actually down from a whopping 50 percent share in production, with the other half being controlled by farmers. Increased demand for ethanol has doubled prices for the fuel, and in the last few years, ADM has had record profits, jumping nearly $100 million in just the first quarter of this year. ADM also has transportation arm for distribution of ethanol and its by-products, the principal one being dry distillers grain which is used as cattle feed.

Another agricultural giant, Cargill Inc., manufactures 120 Million Gallons per year (MMGY) of ethanol at two plants in NE and IA. It has one third ownership in three plants that will produce 300 MMGY in NE, IN, and IA. These new plants are located adjacent to the grain elevators that are also owned by Cargill. Along with its transportation and distribution arms, Cargill and ADM control or have interest in nearly half of all biofuel production in the U.S.

Both of these firms but especially ADM, benefited greatly from the Bush/Cheney Energy Bill that calls for increased ethanol production. Perhaps it is coincidence, but ADM gave $7000 in donations to the Bush campaign, and $400,000 to Republican soft money funds.

As more investment firms and banks move in to create production capacity, the local farmers now represent a smaller piece of the corn fuel pie. Less that 25% of ethanol plants are now owned by farmers. More consolidation is likely to occur, as smaller and weaker producers are bought out by cash heavy firms and investment companies.

Instead of forging a new energy future based on sustainable and renewable energy sources and conservation, we are helping ADM harvest a new crop of dollars from the taxpayers. Even worse, this comes with increased loss of cropland from overproduction, and less food security for our nation. The energy independence claim for ethanol production is just a smoke screen for increased profits for Wall Street and the largest agri-business firms, and will get us no closer to telling the oil merchants in the Middle East to stick it.

Selling the whole deal by pointing to Brazil is part of the public relations scheme being sold by Washington and the big money interests. The facts don't support what we are being told, but that won't stop corporate America from trying.

The Staff of Life

Blog first posted October, 2006 on Myspace
The US has been known for a long time as an over-producer of wheat. Even now, the Midwest is still the breadbasket of the country, and millions of bushels of wheat are exported to other nations every year. There are 60 million acres of wheat under cultivation annually in the US. The wheat growing areas extend from Montana and North Dakota down to Oklahoma and Texas. Typically, wheat requires a temperate climate for growth. Different varieties of wheat can be grown within the temperate zone, for instance hard white wheat can be grown in a drier area, and durum wheat can be grown in colder areas such as North Dakota.

Wheat in the US is rarely irrigated, only 5% of the total wheat crop is under irrigation. Typically, wheat is planted in the fall (winter wheat), and sprouts before winter, when it is dormant. The wheat begins to grow again in the spring, and is ready for harvest in June, the exact timing depends on location and the weather. During the summer growing season, the crop is dependent on warm weather for growth, but temperatures that are too high stop growth. Harvest time is delayed by rain, and rain or hail at harvest can destroy a years worth of effort.

Over the course of the growing season, the wheat crop is subject to the vagaries of weather and natural disaster. Flooding destroyed many acres of wheat in 1999 in the US. Last year, the hot summer decimated the wheat crop in Europe.

With the falling prices of wheat, and increased demand for corn, wheat crop areas are shrinking in the US, although supply has been holding steady or declining only slightly.

While the threat of global warming harming our agriculture may seem unlikely, or something that may happen in the distant future, new research shows the West is already feeling the effects of increased warmth. This is important, given the vulnerability of the U.S. wheat crop to a hotter climate and drier soils.

I have taken a map of the prominent wheat growing areas in the U.S. published by the Department of Agriculture. On to that, I have overlayed the projected changes in soil moisture as a result of global warming in the next 50 years, published by the US EPA. As can be seen by the resulting map, the wheat growing areas are strongly impacted by the changing climate. In particular, the changes in the Great Plains climate are indicative of Dust Bowl conditions.

Interestingly, although the EPA has studied this problem, they conclude that there will only be slightly negative or somewhat positive impacts to agriculture due to global warming. This is due to the increase in growth rate with increased CO2, and "adaptation" by the farmers as a response to changing weather patterns. Wheat, however, is not very responsive to increased CO2 levels. Also, it is hard to see how farmer could respond to drought other than to stop growing wheat. There is not enough water in the underground aquifers to support irrigation for the long term.

Soil Moisture Changes to Wheat Growing Areas.

The picture may actually be bleaker than this. The current trends seem to suggest that the warmer air may not carry the increased moisture once thought. This could mean that areas in the West may suffer more, as increases in moisture where calculated to make up for soil drying.

We need to find solutions to the coming crisis that expand our adaptability. Current government policy is to ignore the potential impacts of climate change on agriculture, or minimize them. Other parts of the world may in fact be more impacted than what we see in the U.S.