US is well known for its questionable high scale farming practices that often have no interest in any sort of animal welfare. Its one of the primary reasons for import controls across Europe for US meat products. It comes up every time the UK or EU negotiate trade deals with the US and came up extremely often during Brexit.
If those import markets were open European producers would struggle to compete with US-agri due to its sheer volume and lack of interest in animal welfare and/or disease control. The UK specifically suffered issues in the past with such issues via "Mad Cow Disease" in the 90s and has attempted to reform its practices as a consequence.
Conversely US agri still seems to ignore these existential nightmares, as most recently seen with Bird Flu and the new administration's troubling ideas with how to deal with it (e.g. the suggestion to avoid culls in order to "find resistent birds").
The US has a ton of problems with agriculture, but I find half of people's complaints about antibiotic use in US farming reaching far beyond what is actually happening in reality. I often hear people complain about antibiotics being in their milk or beef, but there are absolutely no antibiotics in your milk because a single cow on antibiotics getting its milk in a 10,000 gallon tanker will cause the entire load to be dumped, and it is tested for in every batch. As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
> As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.
Is this true? I can't find any source for this claim, just some old papers that suggest the number is closer to 30%, and various government sites that imply the practice is still in place around the world.
Im sure there are a few places in India and China that still do it where alfalfa is expensive while antibiotics cost pennies. But it certainly isn't happening in the US where growing grass is as close to free as anything gets but antibiotics cost a decent amount of money. A 800 pound cow is only worth around $250 pounds to a farmer, so even a 30% increase, which is far beyond optimistic, is at best going to net you $75 extra, which is not going to cover the many months worth of antibiotics it took to dose an animal that large.
the two are not unrelated. if it were purely about the money, they EU wouldn't enact any animal welfare and environmental regulations - but they do. of course they have to protect their markets now, but the question is whether the U.S. model is sustainable. china, for example, is outsourcing its pork production to the U.S. because it's deemed too toxic.
Ethical doesn't have to mean non-functional. Like I previously highlighted the "mad cow" disease pandemic of the 90s shows that these "soft" ideas of not feeding cows beef scraps actually have functional outcomes, despite seeming ethnical at first. This is also evidenced by free-range chickens having less potential exposure to bird flu than hatchery chickens who are packed so close together that the virus can sweep through the entire facility.
Hrrm. Learning by accident, I think. I recall news lines about the failure of ventilation causing mass deaths in the 10s of 1000s. Because they die in the vapors of their own shit, that fast, if packed so dense.
i was told not to use cedar bedding for chicks as "the smell is too strong, it suffocates them." I'll extrapolate that if cedar scent kills chicks, it isn't too far a stretch that their waste can also suffocate them, as that's actually putrid smelling, whereas cedar just smells nice.
