Word: feedlots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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People have eaten meat three times a day for generations. They are fat now because they don't exercise and eat overprocessed food. The feedlot cattle you speak of become finer cuts of meat because corn gives the meat flavor. There is now less erosion in farmland than ever before. Yet we produce more food, cheaper than ever. If it worked that way in medicine, we wouldn't have a health-care crisis. Marcia Gorrell, MARSHALL...
Diet: Grass and corn Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they're switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily...
CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle) The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that's where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They're shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible...
Environmental Impact: Waste A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum...
...hard to avoid the conclusion that this is agribusiness as usual. That said, there are reasons to be cautiously hopeful. Vilsack's spoken encouragingly about capping subsidies and using that money to drive a conservation agenda...On the other hand, he presided over the biggest expansion of feedlot agriculture in Iowa." - Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and a sustainable agriculture advocate, on Vilsack's prospects for bringing about change, National Public Radio...