Category: Livestock

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Corn-fed is grass-fed

See if you can spot the problems with this line of reasoning:

  1. Grass-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.
  2. Corn (maize, and barley, and wheat) is a grass.
  3. Corn-fed beef is grass-fed beef.
  4. Corn-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.

Over at Muck and Mystery Gary does a fine job of unpacking all that logic. Sample:

[T]his would make some sense if they fed the whole corn plant to their cattle rather than just the seeds, and did so while the plant was still alive and vegetative, so that then cattle would get some green with all of that yellow. Better still, grow corn varieties bred for grazing (they exist) that produced more leaf, more nutritious stalks, and less seeds.

There’s more too, on how exaggerated claims from one end of a spectrum call forth exaggerated claims from the other, rather than the nuanced interpretation they really need. Gary talks about backlash. I suspect anyone trying to make sense of the arguments, in beef as in just about anything, would suffer whiplash instead.

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Fishy business

Is it me or has there been a lot on the tubes about aquaponics lately? There was the thing about growing cucumbers and fish in the badlands of Alberta. And that other thing about shivering tilapia in a backyard Thunderdome in the middle of snow-bound rural Connecticut. Classes in the subject at the New Vista High School. A youtube channel. And a blog, natch. Maybe it’s time to dust off those utopian visions of urban fish farms vertically integrated with up-market sushi restaurants.

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Congolese cavies

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since CIAT’s ace snapper Neil Palmer posted his great shots of guinea pigs in the Congo some months back. Finally, it has, with a long post about CIAT’s project More chicken and pork in the pot, and money in the pocket: improving forages for monogastric animals with low-income farmers. You’ll notice at once that guinea pigs are neither pork nor chicken. 1 In fact, they weren’t in the original project at all. But they were in the project’s target area.

Small and easy to conceal, guinea pigs are well-suited to DRC’s conflict zones, where extreme poverty and widespread lawlessness means that the looting of larger domestic livestock is commonplace. …

“We’re not sure exactly how guinea pigs got to DRC,” said CIAT forage scientist Brigitte Maass, “but they have enormous potential to improve rural livelihoods there.”

The post goes on to explain just how guinea pigs work well in the Congo to offer people a measure of food security, and how the project scientists intend to improve that still further. Nice to be able to embrace something new midstream.

“None of the scientists had contemplated guinea pigs as an option in DRC when the project started. Now they really could turn out to be indispensable.”

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Nibbles: EoL, Mixed farming, Conservation medicine, Indicators, Vitamin A, Hamburger, Rewilding, Tejate