I was led back to another book by Jo Robinson, Why Grassfed is Best! In the book, Robinson explained in very accessible language several things, including healthier animals, healthier farmer, food safety, environmental benefits, and health benefits for consumers of grassfed animal products.
Standard industrial farming practices confine animals in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Animals lack exercise, stand endlessly on concrete, and are fed unnatural diets that are aligned with quick turn around times in the CAFOs, but not aligned with the genetic metabolic needs of the animals. Ruminants are designed for a forage diet of grasses, legumes, forbes, browse in the form of tender new tree and bush branches. This diet is balanced with omega 3 and 6 fats. The CAFO diets are dramatically out of balance with typical diets having an omega 3 to 6 ratio of 1:20. This leads to inflammation in the animals. In addition, those high grain diets lead to acidosis in ruminants. In a project I worked on at USU, we fed cattle sodium bicarbonate to try to neutralize the stomach acid associated with the high grain diets. This diet and lifestyle led to rapid burnout in the cattle. At Rawl's pastured dairy farm, typical productive life for cows was about ten years. In the CAFO style, high grain diet farms, five years is unusual. The cows most often burn out within two, yes two, lactations. Monogastrics face similar dilemmas, but are not as severely impacted by high grain diets. Yet they lack exercise, fresh air, the vitamins and minerals from fresh forage, etc. The benefits of pasture in the diet express themselves directly in the animal products as well. Have you ever seen an egg yolk from a chicken with access to grass? The grassfed yolk is rich in beta carotene and expresses itself as a bright orange yolk instead of a pale yellow yolk. My daughter tells me that the baking qualities of a grassfed egg is dramatically different as well, better, MUCH BETTER.
Farmers working on grass farms have better access to fresh air and exercise. They are not subjected to high ammonia and sulfur concentrations of CAFO buildings. They also get to eat nutritionally superior products of their own production. Grass farming also requires significantly less capital investment, easing the financial burdens of the farmers. Many grass farmers have little to no equipment, with perhaps the exception of a four wheel drive ATV. Many grass farm thousands of acres with no tractor, no baler, no hay making or hauling equipment, and no buildings. Financial crisis has historically been one of the key drivers of farmer suicides. Grass farmers face less financial pressure than conventional farmers. Additionally, farmers producing grassfed products have a greater opportunity to more easily engage in direct marketing and capture the lion's share of the consumer dollar, mostly reserved for the middle man. Grass farming is good for farmers.
On the food safety front, CAFOs are bad, bad news for salmonella, E. coli, and campylobacter contamination. These pathogens thrive in the crowded, knee-deep-in-manure conditions of CAFO environments. Work conducted at Cornell University by Russel and Diez-Gonzalez conclusively showed that grassfed beef showed dramatically lower E. coli contamination rates. Other studies have shown that CAFO cattle infected with E. coli, removed from the CAFO environment, and put back on pasture, are almost entirely free of the pathegenic E. coli variants within four weeks. Likewise, eggs from hens on pasture are far less likely to be infected with salmonella than caged or confined hens. Additionally, most animals kept in CAFO environments are fed sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick and to boost growth rates. Grassfed animals are rarely on antibiotics, unless there is a specific clinical need to fight an infection. This lack of antibiotics helps to protects against antibiotic resistance, which is threatening both human and animal health.
On the environmental front, CAFOs are bad news for the environment. CAFO animal waste is not treated in the same way that human waste is treated. It is collected in leaky, open air lagoons and spread on fields periodically in a very dense, overwhelming manner. This management is being regulated more and more, but it is overwhelming with regular leaks into streams and rivers, contamination of acquifers, and almost unbearable air pollution, particularly related to swine operations. Properly managed grassfed animals deposit their waste at sustainable, recyclable, utilizable levels on pastures. They eat the grass and deposit waste there, insuring the recycling of nutrients right where they need to be.
For the human health benefits of grassfed animal products, please go to the Health Benefits section of Jo Robinson's Eat Wild website. In an nutshell, the health benefits include the following: balanced omega 3/6 fats, increased vitamin E, substantial CLA, increased beta carotene and vitamin A (retinol), higher levels and more balanced minerals, and higher in B vitamins. Of course that is not completely inclusive, but it gives you a good start on some of the health benefits. Humans never ate CAFO products before about 1950. We are not designed to eat, process, and utilize the output of CAFO operations. The animal products coming out of a CAFO operation vs. a grassfed operation are very different. Humans have been eating game and other grassfed domesticated animal products for millenia. Vote no to CAFO and yes to grassfed. You will be healthier for it.
