Meet the Genetically Engineered Pig With Earth-Friendly Poop!

[cmjust0]

Quote:
Ditto

I guees I make 3 Ditto

Quadritto.

 

[yotetrapper]

But still no cures for cancer....

 

[Skyesrocket]

Rather than changing the feed they change the pig??

This could be a wonderful thing...I guess...... but.....I think I will wait about 40 years before I try any of that bacon. The older I get the less I trust cutting edge technology.

That was interesting reading, thanks for posting it!​

 

[ntiveheart]

dear God in heaven! now they're genetically modifying intelligent life? we don't yet know what the repercussions of gm fruits and veggies will be in the long run. google monsanto and see the horrors they are to blame for in the name of "science"

this news will give me nightmares

 

[Bunnylady]

Verrry interesting.

Phosphorus is an element. It won't go away, there will be some in the grain, in the waste, in the pig. He's not going to change it into something else. While it may be bound up in a chemical form that isn't usable without this enzyme, there is only so much that the pig needs. Anything that the pig doesn't need, will be excreted in its waste. Unless the feed is altered to contain exactly the amount of phosphorus that the pig needs, there will still be lots of phosphorus in the pig waste.

 

[cmjust0]

Spider PIG!
Spider PIG!
does whateeeever
a spider pig does

can he swing
from a web
no he can't
he's a PIG
LOOOOOKOUT!

He's a SPIDER PIG!

 

[alicefelldown]

Quote:
Why change the feed when subsidies make corn so cheap to buy and yet so profitable to grow? Same goes for cow/beef farming - nature says "feed me grass please" and man says "Well, since Earl "Rusty" Butz (USDA, 1973), AMD, and Cargill have made it so I can get extra money to grow corn "fencerow to fencerow" and a guaranteed price floor - it doesn't make economic sense to grow anything else"

- (Which has been proven to create a less healthy beef product: A corn-fed cow does develop well-marbled flesh, but this is simply saturated fat that can't be trimmed off. Grass-fed meat on the other hand, is lower both in overall fat, and in artery-clogging saturated fat, while being higher in Omega 3s. A sirloin steak from a grain-fed steer has more than double the total fat of a similar cut from a grass-fed steer.)

- (And then, on top of all that, add in the bonus money from turning that corn into High Fructose Corn Syrup, or the bonus money from turning it into Ethanol - it is really quite shocking!)

* I love farmers, and I want them to succeed and be prosperous and not have to get bought out by major corporations. But the subsidies put in place during the depression have been abused by corporations out to make a quick buck at the expense of the health of Americans.

 

[alicefelldown]

Quote:
Well yea - if they are grown and raised sustainably. But as we've seen with chickens and eggs - profit trumps all.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...ducer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

....

Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

A lot of pig poop is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig poop is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig poop: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from poop and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig poop. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog poop can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.​

 

[PaulaJoAnne]

Quote:
Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Put those pigs out in the sun, on pasture, and stop feeding them nasty garbage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Those of you that think this is a good thing, better think again.
We have no business treating them as disposable money makers.
Something to be messed around with.
Treat them right, and they will become healthy and give good meat and manure.

 

[bumpershoot]

two wrongs (industrial hog farming and GM hogs) don't make a right.

Once again, vote with your dollars and support your local farmer.