Organically fed animals

Sea chick wrote on another thread (Don't know how to quote from one thread to another) about the terrible things that beef producers are allowed to feed their cattle. Not only is it yucky, it could be deadly.

Mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, and it's human variation, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is fatal for both cows and humans.

A tiny malformed protein called a prion is the BSE culprit. Prions affect the nervous systems of infected cows, and cause death. How do cows contract prions? FROM EATING OTHER COWS. Dead cow byproducts get mixed into their feed. (This was in the 1980s) BTW, the UK eradicated BSE after the 80s outbreak.
Now US policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows.
Prions are not killed by extreme heat or any known drug, and survive this process easily.

"Not a single case of BSE, anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised and finished on pasture grass and organic feed."

This information was taken from, and a lot more is available from a book by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver called , "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

The book covers many interesting topics and is highly entertaining and readable. They also have a website by the same title.

Here's what we wrote in the other thread:

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT:
Sort of off-topic, but on the subject of spent hens being made into pet food, I just read an article in Mother Earth News about what 99% of commercial cows are being fed these days. Some horrifying things there, including spent hens ground up with "poultry litter"!!!!!! So your supermarket beef is fed chicken shavings, poop, feathers, and old hens. Actually that is the least disgusting. They cited a farmer who fed 30% of the diet as "stale chewing gum, including aluminum wrappers". Others fed a 100% "old french-fry and tater tot" diet. Others fed stale candy bars, stale pizza dough. And UREA. And even heat-treated garbage is allowed by the USDA as suitable feed for the beef you buy at the supermarket. They do not require producers to tell consumers what the animals were fed.

From the "Journal of American Science" study: stale chewing gum in its wrappers "can safely replace at least 30 percent of cattle-growing or finishing diets without impairing feedlot performance or carcas quality"

YUCK YUCK YUCK

I am SO glad we bought our grass-fed cow last fall!
(Olivia says: "I am so glad that I don't eat that kind of meat anymore!")
(Stacey says: "I'm sorry to all the moms of Olivia's friends who she is sure to tell this to. Thier kids will be complaining about dinner.")

Here's a link to the entire Mother Earth news article on line:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Live...-You-Need-to-Know-About-the-Beef-You-Eat.aspx

And here's a good resource for finding organic and/or grass-fed beef (and other locally grown food) near you:
http://www.localharvest.org/

and here for pasture-raised beef and other foods: http://www.eatwild.com/

Have y'all ever had dry aged beef? I have been reading both threads and I completely agree with you. I am trying to save up some $$ to buy half a cow that's been dry aged. THta's the way all beef used to be processed and it's way more flavorful with no added ANYTHING! When meat is wet packed it loses lots of flavor. I am lucky to have a cattle man 20 minutes away from me thta uses only corn and grass and then dry ages all of his beef. He feeds no antibiotics or growth hormones. He even cuts us homeschoolers specials when we order in bulk! I know it's sad to cull birds but I am thinking of raising just a few for food and then eating only that kind of beef. That way my family won't be fed a bunch of crap that our government thinks is ok!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was/is advertised as the experience of one family eating local for one year. Instead I found it to be nothing more than a liberal political statement against nearly every thing and everybody that produces anything not on a tiny family farm.

I do not trust alot of what is that book because stats can be made to say anything you want them to say depending on the interpretation. Plus the recipes were not that good nor that orginal.

I don't want to get away from the topic of this thread and the orgainc fed animals but that is one book that is not an ideal study and it doesn't serve the average american family looking to be self sufficient and self sustaining.

I was offended in more than one way when I read the book, hugely disappointed and feel like it was a waste of my time to even bother with reading it.

It is nothing much more than one woman's political diatribe on what is wrong with the world and her food supply.

What she doesn't tell you openly is the financial side of her story, how they spent at least a year previous to converting and renovating and old farmhouse to make it efficient for her book plans, setting in stock and supplies before setting out on this venture, and buying feed and equipment for an entire year in bulk to stock pile in their larders, sending one daughter college, taking vacations and expensive feild trips to 'learn' skills they didn't already possess.

This wasn't just a journey to eat local for one year.

Every thing is not as it appears and a lot of smoke and mirrors were used to give you a reflection they wanted you to see.

I'm waiting for MissPrissy's book to come out!!

We're lucky b/c Mr. C's dad raises a couple of cows, so he sells us one every year. I'm even more glad after reading the posts about what they feed cows. Yuck.

Quote:
this is incorrect...no beef waste is allowed in chicken feed (not unless they have changed the laws)... it is why many look to game feed to get the meat protein they want for their chickens *not sure what the protein source for that is btw).....
However you do not need to worry about beef tissue (and possible prion disease from it) and your chicken feed because it is not allowed.

Actually, here in the United States it IS true. That fact was well-document and explored by Michael Pollan back in 2002 (way before Barbara Kingsolver's book). Not only is beef allowed to be fed to chicken, but that chicken by-product is allowed to be fed BACK to the beef, creating a closed loop system. You can read the full article here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C06E5DB153BF932A05750C0A9649C8B63

Eric Schlosser also documents some of this in his excellent book, "Fast Food Nation."

That article really changed my life and how my family eats. I no longer buy commercially raised beef; only grass-fed beef from local ranchers that I've met and talked to. It also means I pay upwards of $10-17/lb for my meat, which de facto means we eat much less red meat than we used to. I can't say that's a bad thing. Until the 1950's, red meat used to be a special treat in the American diet, not something to chow down on two or three times a day.

Quote:
You misread what she wrote, skatcatla.

I have read several of B. Kingsolver's books, and liked everyone of them. The section of the book about mad cow disease, wasn't written by her- it was written by her husband, Steven Hopp, who is a teacher of environmental studies at Emory and Henry College in southern Virginia.
All of the articles that he wrote for the book are referenced. I haven't read all of the reference material.

Miss Prissy, in the book it clearly lets the reader know that the farm that they moved to was owned by her husband, and that they spent every summer there for years- planting asparagus, fruit trees, etc...
Kingsolver is a well known and respected (obviously not by you) author, who I'm sure has plenty of money to spend on colleges, vacations etc... That is not the point. I didn't say it was a self sufficiency Bible, it is however a very good read.