By Dave Riley
Australia is home to 17 million people and 24 million cattle. On a cowpat ratio, that's one of the highest proportions of cattle to people in the world. In Queensland, beef cattle outnumber humans by more than two to one.
In the meat cattle industry, the top 10% of producers contribute 52% of the entire value of the output. As in all farming sectors, the growth of agribusiness and years of drought are reducing the Australian countryside to a two-tiered society.
As a result of these changes in Australian agriculture, approximately 10% of the cattle slaughtered each year are now finished in giant feedlots, where they can spend up to five months being fattened on a grain diet.
This is the norm for beef fattening in the United States, where agribusiness is keen to supplement grains with other concoctions. Some US feedlots are now adding cardboard, newspaper and sawdust to the feeding programs to reduce costs. According to the US Department of Agriculture, cement dust may be a particularly attractive feed supplement in the future because it produces a 30% faster weight gain than regular feed.
Kansas State University is experimenting with plastic feed as an artificial form of cheap roughage. Researchers point to the extra savings of using the new plastic feed because at slaughter time upward of 10 kilograms of the stuff can be recovered from the slaughtered cow, melted down and recycled into new pellets.
Feedlot fattening hit the headlines in Queensland with an outbreak of botulism in January 1990. Botulism is a powerful nerve toxin produced by bacteria in decaying organic matter. It leads to rapid paralysis and death of the affected animal.
Early in 1990, an estimated 5600 cattle died in two feedlots in Queensland. According to the Department of Primary Industries' report, the cause of death was poison resulting from chicken litter/manure which was part of the cattle's feed. While the meat from feedlot cattle is marked as grain-fed beef, these cattle had been fed processed chicken manure from intensely farmed poultry sheds.
Early in 1991, another 2681 cattle died in a Queensland feedlot. This time the cause of death was heat stress. Current regulations governing cattle feedlots specifically stated that " tree cover should not provide shade for confined stock". The government guidelines went on to explain that "the congregation of stock in shaded areas results in the formation of wet patches and a subsequent increase in odour generation potential".
While some feedlots now provide shade, DPI guidelines specify that manure can be 200 mm deep or even deeper on large feedlots. Conditions such as these can lead to footrot and mastitis in cows, while the grain diet increases the acidity in bovine rumen, one of the four stomachs in cattle. This can lead to many diseases.
Feedlots are also an environmental disaster. Apart from dust, flies, and odour pollution, in many instances the run-off of accumulated urine and manure pollutes local waterways.
While most grain-fed beef is exported, greed lots such as these will become more common as megabucks farming transforms the countryside. Like the bouncing tomato (so dense it can bounce like a ball), the bruiseless banana and the featherless chicken (designed to eliminate the need for plucking), the history and attributes of the food available in the supermarket are becoming increasingly suspect.