Word: livestock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Long-established practices in the livestock industry are also worrisome. For decades, cattle ranchers have been promoting weight gain in steers and heifers by giving them drugs. More than half the 35 million U.S. cattle sold at market each year had pellets embedded behind their ears that during key growth stages slowly released hormones, including testosterone or progesterone. The drugs can cut 21 days off the time needed for an animal to reach 1,000 lbs. and at the same time promote development of leaner meat. Ranchers say this translates into savings for them (the $1 implant shaves roughly...
Historians have long considered the 1908 livestock feeding barn of the Manchester family in New Hampshire, Ohio, to be one of the finest examples of a round barn in the Midwest. That was nice, but until recently, the barn was nearly useless for modern grain farming. Like most old barns, it contained stalls for livestock and horses -- the preindustrial tractors of agriculture -- and a cavernous hayloft for storing their fuel. Over time, the outmoded barn weathered and withered. But during the past 15 years, to avoid new construction costs, the Manchesters have braced the old roof, installed modern seed-conditioning...
...rehabbed hundreds of barns around the country. Ciolek creates higher, longer open spaces by a process called trussing. First he rearranges the old post-and-beam construction, then transfers the weight of the roof and hayloft to the outside walls by means of triangular wooden supports. Says Illinois livestock farmer Janis King, who had Ciolek fix up an 1870 barn: "Unless lightning strikes, the barn will be here another 100 years...
...deluge. Its message was loud and clear, and suddenly people began to listen, to ponder what portents the message held. In the U.S., a three-month drought baked the soil from California to Georgia, reducing the country's grain harvest by 31% and killing thousands of head of livestock. A stubborn seven-week heat wave drove temperatures above 100 degrees F across much of the country, raising fears that the dreaded "greenhouse effect" -- global warming as a result of the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere -- might already be under way. Parched by the lack...
...poorest countries, growth rates are outstripping the national ability to provide the bare necessities -- housing, fuel and food. Living trees are being chopped down for fuel, grasslands overgrazed by livestock, and croplands overplowed by desperate farmers. Horrifying images of starvation in northeastern Africa have captured world attention in the past decade. In India, according to government reports, 37% of the people cannot buy enough food to sustain themselves. Warned Shri B.B. Vohra, vice chairman of the Himachal Pradesh state land-use board in northern India: "We may be well on the way to producing a subhuman kind of race where...