Greetings fellow Green Bleeders: Vegetarians, Vegans, and Animal Rights Activists are all considered by me to be brothers and sisters in a cause where we share the same ultimate goal but seek to achieve that goal by very different means. The goal is liberation of animals from cruelty, brutality and deprivation combined with food production which nearly eliminates ecological damage. How is that done? Beef from pasture cattle requires no synthetic inputs such as herbicides, insecticides, or erosion-causing tillage of any kind ). Vegetables and grains cannot exist without hand labor, mechanized tillage and chemical fertilizer plus poisons. Pastured cattle roam extensive natural rangeland and lead unmolested lives until the day they are shipped to slaughter. I do not de-horn, vaccinate, de-worm, castrate, or inject growth promotants. Finally, if the cattle are not eaten by humans, they would never get to exist to begin with, and that seems to me to be the ultimate in animal welfare abuse. I invite your texts or email and look forward to fruitful dialogue.
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The only way to answer this question is to define conventional beef.
1.) Unrestricted and unlimited use of antibiotics 2.) Confinement in crowded, dangerous feedlots 3.) Castration, dehorning, deworming, use of growth promotants, feed additives, hysterectomies 4.) Large packers use chemicals to "clean" eviscerated carcasses that are contaminated with intestinal contents from the automated evisceration (de-hiding) machines operated at rapt speed. 5.) Conventional beef is wet-aged versus dry-aged resulting in 10-12% more moisture per ounce. 6.) Pigment fixatives are used in the packaging to make it appear fresher. There are many listing services on the internet, and they can be helpful to the consumer. But they can also be misleading. Some of them require payment to be listed. Some of them will just go through search engines and put businesses on their list. Some of them admit that they are just a list, and some of them indicate that they have vetted the ranch or farm and that the ones on their list are recommended. Some of them claim that the purpose for their list is to promote a green way of living and to help small farmers.
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AuthorMike Bodensteiner is a rancher and a farmer and owns A Better Way Beef. ArchivesCategories |
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