“Although I’ve had a lot of tough interviews in my day, that was definitely the toughest and most unique interview experience of my career,” Boyle said. “I was honored to play straight man to the hilarious Stephen Colbert and to demonstrate that while meat processing is serious business, we can be good sports.” AMI reports that Boyle’s interview with the comedian was two hours long, edited down to a four minute segment for the show.
Colbert’s intro to the interview features him “pledging allegiance” to a bacon flag: “I pledge allegiance to the meat of the United Steaks of America. And to the ribeye for which it broils, one bacon under God, with liver and onions for all!”
Chomping down on a huge turkey leg, Colbert confounds Boyle with questions like, “At what point will the AMI say ’stop America, that’s the perfect amount of meat’?” and “Who’s pooping on our meat?” Colbert’s pièce de résistance comes when he asks (hypothetically, of course) if AMI would endorse the eating of people if there were no more animals. “The American Meat Institute would not support a policy of cannibalism,” says Boyle with a straight face. “We would not recommend humans for human consumption.”
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, it is pretty darn funny.
Many of our livestock producers today are family owned and operated ventures that make their animal’s care, health, and comfort a priority. In this age of worst case scenarios getting the limelight it was refreshing to come across a very accurate and honest view of the nation’s livestock producers.
Given the extreme stories, messages and views that pound us every day from dozens of information sources in this wired world, I think we all need a reprieve. We all need places to go for perspective and this is particularly true regarding livestock production. Given the antics of lobbying groups like the Humane Society of the U.S., that disguise themselves as an animal welfare group, journalists like Michael Pollan giving advice on feeding cattle, and chef’s promoting specific crop and livestock rearing practices with no real education on the subject..it makes me want to scream.
Type the letters “Mi” into Google and Pollan’s name pops up and this crank – possibly well-meaning but still a crank – comes up immediately showing the influence he is having on society via the New York Times Best Seller List, rather than logging years nurturing cows or sweating in a cattle feedlot.
All of the above scenarios are roughly equivalent to going to a plumber for advice on brain surgery. I would certainly prefer to know my meat/protein comes from well managed family operations like David Fremark’s in St. Lawrence, South Dakota or Jamie Willret of Malta, Illinois referenced in the above blog. You will find farmers and ranchers outside the city limits of most any town or city. In fact these days you can find many of them as close as your laptop or smart phone via social media. #agchat on twitter is a great place to ask a question on almost anything related to farming and food production. I encourage you to start a dialogue.
Lack of knowledge on how livestock specifically and agriculture in general works is a huge risk for society today. Uniformed people make bad decisions and in this case potentially decisions that are irreparable as family farms don’t come back once they are gone.
The ethanol by-product known as dried distillers grains, or DDGs, is being fed more often these days to all types of livestock. At first, it was mainly beef and dairy cattle producers that utilized the product, which is rich in protein, fiber and oil. Now more hog producers are using the product, which serves to recapture about one third of the corn that goes into making ethanol for the livestock feed market. Each bushel of grain used in the ethanol-making process produces about 18 pounds of DDGS.
Companies like Novus International are helping to increase the use of DDGs in pork production by researching how much DDGs can be included in hog rations at different ages for proper nutrition. “We’ve increased the inclusion rates of distillers from just a few years ago, somewhere around ten percent, now to 30-40 percent in some diets,” says Brad Lawrence, Technical Manager for the Novus pork business in North America.
During the recent World Pork Expo in Des Moines, Lawrence said that has fundamentally changed the nutritional content of the pig’s diet, so Novus did some modeling and research and found that including oxidative balance additives in the feed helped get optimum performance from the animals. “Ethanol is here to stay,” Lawrence said. “There’s some concerns about corn availability, but as we put corn into an ethanol plant, we’re getting distillers back out. As swine nutritionists, that means we have to learn what the optimum nutritional technologies are that we can implement to get the most value out of the distillers.”
Listen to an interview with Brad Lawrence from World Pork Expo here:
Guest Blog from Jennifer Elwell and her “Food, Mommy” Blog (More on the author at the bottom of the page)
Back when I was a kid (we’ll say 20 to 30 years ago), vegetarians were few and far between and were often thought of as a little strange. Now, it seems, being a vegetarian or vegan is the “stylish” thing to do. More and more people of all ages are making the choice not to eat meat for reasons that make sense to them.
The majority of the population continues to eat meat because that’s what they have always done, as their parents did before them. As our ancestors figured out, eating meat is an easy way to get protein, and most of it just tastes good.
I put myself in a different meat-eating category. I have a made a very conscious decision, and I “choose” to eat meat. I know it comes from animals, and I realize those animals’ lives were cut short for my sustenance. This is something I think about each time I sit down to a meal, and I am grateful.
As a true lover of animals, I will admit that going meatless crossed my mind a couple times. I am the kind of person who never kills a spider, carefully removes creepy-crawlies from my home, and stops traffic to see a turtle or family of ducks safely cross the road. My taste buds and feeling of hunger satisfaction, however, quickly transformed me back into the omnivore that I am.
Now, one could ask how I can eat meat when animals are being mistreated (recent Conklin Dairy video would be a good example) or are forced to live in confined conditions. In my good opinion, acts of such mistreatment are few and far between, and I believe that anyone who abuses animals in this way should be punished as if they had assaulted a fellow human. Confinement, or as I like to think of it has a more controlled habitat, has become a necessary practice to meet demand. There are more people, less farmers and less land to produce these animals.
Do the animals like their confined conditions? Would they rather be running free? While I don’t have cows or chickens at the moment, I do have horses. It has been 90 degrees or higher the last several days. They have free run of the barn and a five acre pasture with lots of shade trees. I CANNOT MAKE them leave the confinement of their stalls. Why? The barn has a large fan and is generally free of all the blood-sucking bugs. They also know that I come to feed them twice a day. (more…)
If you are a row crop farmer who hasn’t raised livestock in years you might wonder how much energy and personal capitol you want to expend educating people about the anti-livestock efforts of the Humane Society of the United States. Besides the obvious large feed consumption, recent developments should have you even more concerned.
Regular readers of this blog realize giving donations to your local animal shelters is a good thing. They actually help animals, unlike the loosely related Humane Society of the United States that gives nearly nothing to support these efforts. Instead, HSUS chooses to use its significant and questionably acquired resources to pursue an animal rights agenda and vegan lifestyle.
HSUS is systematically going from state to state trying to enforce their minority agenda by passing laws that would radically change safe, proven and productive livestock rearing practices. And they are leveraging their positive reputation – yes they have one because people think they are saving puppies – to tell farmers and ranchers how to do their job.
Their most recent effort in Ohio seemed to have ended well when voters showed them the door and told the carpetbaggers to go home. Ohio chose to form their own state board of experts to review, monitor and police livestock production practices.
This is where your radar should go up and the red lights should start flashing. HSUS is now trying to get an initiative on the November ballot that would force the state’s new Livestock Care Standards Board to mimic the policies that HSUS got passed with its last ballot measure, in California.
It appears the gathering of signatures wasn’t going well so HSUS sued the state of Ohio over a statute that was written to make sure only Ohioans could gather signatures to change state laws. HSUS remarkably won that suit.
This means groups like HSUS can now bring in paid, if not professional, employees to work the streets and gather the needed signatures to tell Ohio how to run their state. Given their past use of disingenuous images and information to acheive their goal, this does not bode well.
Personally, I am concerned other groups are watching the twisted success of HSUS and contemplating how this strategy might be applied to other issues and governing practices touching your profession and your day-to-day life. Precedence, even bad precedence, carries weight.
The good news is Ohio agriculture is working hard to assure a good outcome. In the interim, do your part by learning more about the real HSUS and tell your friends.
It is pretty hard to improve upon corn-fed beef, but research coming out of the University of Illinois shows that there may be a way to maintain the delicious flavor and reasonable cost while improving farmer profitability.
Beef lovers know that high marbling makes a great steak. Just by looking at the cut in the butcher’s case, they can see the quality. Corn-fed beef offers better marbling than any alternative.
Now, farmers can achieve the same succulent steak by utilizing the ethanol co-product distillers dried grains. Created when starch is removed from corn to make ethanol, DDGs are rich in essential nutrients such as protein, fat, minerals and vitamins. As one bushel of corn produces 2.8 gallons of ethanol and 17 pounds of distillers grains, they offer an economical, environmentally friendly alternative.
The research indicates that beef produced using this product can improve farmers’ bottom lines without compromising quality. Following the feeding guidelines that the trial recommends even cuts the time needed to prepare the cattle for market.
“We believe feeding a high-grain ration to cattle at a young age and finishing them on co-products is the most profitable way to produce high-quality beef,” said University of Illinois animal scientist Dan Shike.
Research from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln shows that feeding “reproducing cows corn co-products is beneficial to their post calving gain, reproduction and may improve beef production sustainability.” Again, corn co-products produce a win-win situation as growers can improve profitability implementing suggestions in the while increasing industry sustainability.
With growers increasing profitability and consumers enjoying the same corn-fed taste that they already love, everyone wins.
Some may argue that food and fuel are at odds, but DDGS provide a perfect example of how we can have domestically produced ethanol and a functional and efficient feed product. The more facts that emerge, the more evident it becomes that corn can meet these needs making both refiners and livestock growers profitable while sparing consumer pocketbooks.
Thanks to Guest Blogger Andy Vance. Farm Broadcaster Andy Vance owns and operates the Agri Broadcast Network (ABN Radio), Ohio’s Voice for Agriculture, and a small herd of Shorthorn cattle.
Sun-Tsu, the legendary military strategist so often co-opted into ‘80s business reading material, built his strategy around the basic premise that you must know your enemy to truly defeat him. For that reason, and to keep my blood pressure from ever dipping into the “normal” range, I read Wayne Pacelle’s blog. Wayne is the CEO/Chief Lobbyist/Spokesmodel for the Humane Society (in name only) of the United States. This $200 million activist lobbying group works to raise funds by working the long con that they are some how engaged in helping animals. In so doing, they raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually that they in turn spend on lobbying and political activities to force Americans into a radicalized vegan lifestyle devoid of any animal-derived proteins or products. While they typically deny this fanatical end-goal, if you read Wayne’s blog regularly, he frequently slips up and says what he actually means.
HSUS first ventured into the arena of ballot-initiative political campaigns in Florida in 2002. Their effort, to end the use of gestation stalls on hog farms, was for this “sophisticated political organization” (Wayne’s self-description of HSUS) sticking their toe in the shallow end of the pool. In a multi-state, multi-year strategy, the organization has worked to step-by-step, and state-by-state drive modern agriculture and farm families out of business to drive up the cost of meat, milk, and eggs in the hopes of lowering demand for those products.
But, don’t just take my word for it: “When voters approved it, it was the first restriction on a severe confinement practice in the U.S. Now, eight year later, it has achieved its principal purpose: it kept giant hog factory farms from colonizing Florida, as they did three decades ago in North Carolina.”
So, in Wayne’s own words, the purpose wasn’t to save the pigs. HSUS’ “principle purpose” was to keep hog farms out of Florida in the first place. (more…)
An old saying states that you can tell the measure of someone by the company they keep. In that regard, the American Meat Institute is keeping some rather curious company these days as it wages war on an imagined enemy, the corn ethanol industry. AMI recently signed onto political letters and advertisements with environmental extremists like Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group that they should avoid at all costs. These three organizations have all attacked animal agriculture with the same level of rhetoric as PETA or the Humane Society.
As the self-proclaimed representative of the “companies that process 95 percent of red meat and 70 percent of turkey in the U.S. and their suppliers throughout America,” AMI really should avoid such curious connections.
I recently asked someone very familiar with the membership of AMI – companies like Tyson’s, Smithfield and Hormel – to help me understand the logic that would persuade AMI to take these actions. He laughed and said, “You have to realize, these are companies whose business is ‘blood on the floor,’ and all that they can see is short-term.”
Fortunately, most of the rest of agriculture is trying to take a long-term view and has realized that it is high time to put petty differences aside and agree to disagree on certain issues – like ethanol policy, with the realization that we all have much greater battles to fight with those outside of agriculture who are threatening to undermine the very fabric and structure that has made us the most successful and productive sector in the U.S. economy.
Among the challenges common to row-crop and animal agriculture are the following:
The Humane Society of the United States, whose goal is to completely change the structure of animal agriculture in the United States. If successful, it would result in a significant increase in the cost of meat produced here, drive much of our meat production out of the U.S. and undermine much of the demand base for row crop agriculture. AMI should be solidly opposed to HSUS and be an active part of the groups that are working to oppose HSUS. Instead, they are embracing Friends of the Earth, a solid ally of HSUS and a cohort in HSUS efforts.
Indirect land use change. AMI signed on to letters supporting the application of this mythological impact of biofuels. In EPA and California Air Resource Board modeling, that single theory changed domestic ethanol and biodiesel from being advanced biofuels to being worse in greenhouse gas measures than gasoline. If that sticks, where will that put the carbon footprint of the domestic livestock industry – the single-largest user of U.S. corn and soybeans?
Commodity prices. Seemingly the reason AMI has formed its unholy coalition is to make more corn and soybeans available and at a cheaper price, for the livestock industry and eliminate the competition for such by the ethanol industry. Yet AMI’s “allies” in this fight roundly condemn corn and soybean production as environmentally unfriendly. An NRDC representative, in recent Congressional testimony, suggested that we grow “too much” corn in the United States and we ought to be growing less. NRDC also has promoted eating “grass-fed” over “corn-fed” beef.
House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson. Regardless of political affiliation, few of us in agriculture can help but be grateful for congressional leadership like that of Rep. Peterson. Apparently AMI is one of those few. Their friend and ally, Friends of Earth, last month named Chairman Peterson their 2010 “Biofool of the Year.”
AMI’s high-profile, expensive media and ad campaign is nothing but classic short-term thinking and “blood on the floor” mentality. What is to gain in the short-run by embracing the very people who are out to put you out of business? Their recent ad spawned an editorial in the Washington Times this week titled “Stop Big Corn.” Just as emotional labels like “factory farming” and “corporate farms” are unfortunate, inaccurate and misleading, with more than nine out of 10 farms being family-run, so are labels like “Big Corn.”
The American Meat Institute is doing itself and its industry and all of agriculture a major disservice by engaging in these scorched-earth tactics and being a part of this unholy alliance. It’s time for some long-term thinking and for all of us in agriculture to work together and not split ourselves apart. There are plenty of folks doing a pretty good job of that – they don’t need any help from AMI.
Corn growers all over the country are preparing for the 2010 Commodity Classic next week in Anaheim where important policy issues facing farmers and ranchers will be discussed.
Members of the Missouri Corn Growers Association got in the mood this week by holding their annual meeting in Jefferson City and going to talk with state lawmakers about the importance of keeping agriculture in the hands of farmers. National Corn Growers Association president Darrin Ihnen (right) was guest speaker at the Missouri luncheon. With him pictured is Mike Geske, former president of the Missouri Corn Growers now serving on the 15-member National Corn Board.
I interviewed both Darrin and Mike about some of the issues important to growers right now and topping the list is the threat posed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), which is in the process of working up a petition drive in Missouri directed at dog breeders – lumping them all in the unsavory category of “puppy mills” – kind of like they lump all of agriculture under “factory farming.” Mike says that is why all agriculture groups in the state are working to keep legislators informed about how food is produced and the importance of the industry to Missouri. “We feel that once they get past the dog breeders they are going to be headed for commercial agriculture,” he told me.
Darrin says the threat posed to animal agriculture in individual states by groups like HSUS ultimately impacts all of agriculture across the country. “It’s very important that we help defend them,” Darrin says. “We can’t be separated when it comes to agriculture. We need to work together.”
This is just one of many important policy issues that corn growers will discuss at Classic next week, the annual meeting that also includes soybean, wheat and sorghum producers. Others include the indirect land use issue, climate legislation, increasing the ethanol blend rate and extending the blender’s tax credit for ethanol.
Listen to back to back interviews with Darrin and Mike here:
The Center For Consumer Freedom is turning up the heat on the Humane Society of the United States. This week they took out a full page ad in the New York Times that highlights “the failure of the Humane Society of the United States to devote a significant amount of money to supporting America’s underfunded pet shelters. The ad explains that HSUS shares only 1 dollar out of every 200 dollars it collects with local, hands-on pet shelters.” That is graphically reflected with 200 little puppy paw prints, just one of which represents the money that goes to help homeless pets.
The ad reads:
Shouldn’t the “Humane Society” do better?
The Humane Society of the United States is NOT your local animal shelter. In fact, it gives less than one-half of one percent of its $100 million budget to hands-on pet shelters.
Meanwhile, this wealthy animal rights group socked away over $2.5 million of Americans’ donations in its own pension plans.
Surprised? So were we. The dog-watchers need a watchdog. Join the discussion at HumaneWatch.org.
American Meat Institute (AMI) President J. Patrick Boyle was the main dish on comedian Stephen Colbert’s “Know Your Lobby” segment, which profiles lobbying organizations. 
The ethanol by-product known as dried distillers grains, or DDGs, is being fed more often these days to all types of livestock. At first, it was mainly beef and dairy cattle producers that utilized the product, which is rich in protein, fiber and oil. Now more hog producers are using the product, which serves to recapture about one third of the corn that goes into making ethanol for the livestock feed market. Each bushel of grain used in the ethanol-making process produces about 18 pounds of DDGS. 
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