Do you know of any systems where beef cattle are receiving growth hormones? I’ve only ever heard of dairy cattle getting supplements of Bovine Somatotropin.
Chickens are omnivores.
Besides, worms wiggle, and therefore are irresistible.
I have no personal experience with beef cattle being given growth hormones. That didn’t happen when my family was raising beef 20 years ago.
But the New York Times article linked by toadspittle does discuss hormones:
Here’s where I’d like to see the FDA step in, and put a stop to hormone use, or at least require labeling. (I hate to insert politics into the discussion, but I doubt that would ever happen under a Republican administration.)
I’ve raised beef and lamb for over 40 years. We never “finish” our animals on grain. Throughout their lives they get a little handful, maybe a half a pound daily, of grain just to keep them coming into the barn so we can take a good look at them every day, and that’s it. They are sent to slaughter in September or October after eating their heads off in the pasture all summer. The meat is tender and delicious. Unless half-starved and in training for racing, no beef under 2 years old should be tough.
Canadian feedlot operators are not allowed to use growth hormones. Are growth hormone residues harmful to humans? I don’t know, but I prefer not to take the chance, particularly for my kids.
The beef industry has a great deal of power in the US and has convinced many consumers that the way they do things is the only way or at any rate, the only right way. But there are alternatives, as several posts in this thread have pointed out.
Aside from anything else, most North Americans eat far more meat than is good for them. A rise in price might be beneficial to health.
This is about the 4th thread on this topic that I’ve seen since I joined this board, so it’s obviously of interest to Dopers. As a farmer for over 40 years, I have a lot of experience, and am glad to share my insights, although I do realize that the plural of anecdote is not “data”.
I believe local ( to me ) specialty producer Niman Ranch does just that: Niman Ranch - Wikipedia
Oh man, do I wish there was a way I could bulk purchase beef from you. Canadian beef rocks.
I don’t have an overview of the whole industry, but there’s a market for hormone-free milk and beef, even at higher prices. Our local dairy, IIRC, has gone hormone-free. Their suppliers have signed on. The consumers are keeping up with the supply.
Hormone-free beef is seen here and there in the supermarkets, too (Laura’s®, for example.) On the local level, the family who can store a side of beef can easily find an “old-school” farmer who raises strictly grass-fed, hormone-free animals.
My point is that hormone-free should be the standard, not a specialty product (with all the inflated pricing that usually entails). It used to be the standard. The government should be stepping in here.
I agree, but the USDA works with glacial speed. In this area, the demand for hormone-free products may change things before the government does anything. Five years ago, organic produce was uncommon. Now, in most supermarkets, organic veg is at least a fourth of the produce section. Even Wal :eek: Mart is going organic.
The government, unfortunately, will probably continue to listen to the powerful Agriculture lobby, to the oil lobby, and to the huge corporations that process and sell food.
Hormone use in both beef and dairy cattle was pushed hard: it’s good for the bottom line and that’s the only important consideration. No one really knows what the long term effects of hormone residues are. Since no immediate harm is apparent, it must be all right, right?
Yet “good for the bottom line” is such short-term thinking! It always is, and not only in agriculture. It seems to me that business often fails to consider the future, even the future 5 years away. (I say “often”, not “always”.)
As more consumers demand hormone-free and antibiotic-free meat, more farmers will provide it. The price ought to come down. However, with the rise in oil prices, even “conventional” agricultural products are increasing in price. Growing food the modern way takes a lot of petroleum. We have a lot of room for price increases: North Americans spend about 8 or 9 % of their income on food - if you compare that to even wealthy European nations, we get off pretty lightly at present.
Ok, since we’re now on the topic of hormones, I have questions.
I’ve been studying modern agriculture here in California for the last 8 years.
To my knowledge, there is no management system that involves giving hormones to beef cattle. Dairy, yes, but not beef.
But my information is all academic. Do we have any dopers who are current beef raisers and who can attest to the use of hormones in beef cattle? If so, what hormone?
And citing news reports won’t satisfy me (sorry, spoke-).
I could give you hundreds of layman news reports that talk about hormone use in meat and egg laying chickens when I know for damned sure that no such thing ever happens.
Clarification: Digging around on pubmed, I found a couple of studies looking at the effect on growth in beef cattle when supplemented with estradiol.
But my question still stands: Does anyone have first or second hand knowledge of any large scale efforts to do hormone supplementation in beef cattle?
Will also check with some of the beef guys I know. But, what they know and what actually happens in the field are sometimes different things.
All I have time for right now. From these links you will see it is routine to use hormones, generally implanted.
Thanks for the links, vision. Talking with some of my more beef-savvy classmates, it appears that hormonal implants are used in certain circumstances.
They also repeated some important caveats that your links point out.
From Iowa State:
“Implanting nursing calves is one of the most under-utilized but proven management practices in the beef industry”
That page is from 2006. So, it seems that hormonal supplementation is not as widespread as commonly believed.
Iowa State also points out that beef from implanted cattle has 1/5th of the amount of estrogenic compounds as milk, and 1/1000th the amount found in cabbage.
Not exactly sure where I’m going with this. Clearly, all the current evidence shows that the hormones are not a risk. But I agree that long-term research is lacking, and that a push towards more expensive foodstuffs would go a long way towards helping a lot of things on different levels. On the other hand, America feeds a lot of places. Would more expensive food push those folks into starvation? Will it simply encourage the expansion of local production, so that local economies step up? What about the risk of pushing production out to a place where we can’t monitor it?
It seems like the only real answer is to simply have fewer humans. But that’s not a real answer at all. 
Well, not quite routine. The UGA site says only 33% of producers use the procedure. Not as common as the NY Times article implies.
That 33% probably produces 90% of the beef, though. That’s a guess, admittedly, but an educated guess.
More expensive beef would likely not. If the beef got more expensive because the cattle were being raised on grass rather than corn, then it could actually fight hunger. You don’t need such fertile land to grow grass. All of that corn (or whatever crops were being raised on that land) would be available to people instead of cattle.
vison, no offense, but if you’re marketing grass-finished beef, I’m not sure we can count on you as a neutral observer. 
I’m extremely small potatoes as these things go!!! I don’t “market” it as such, just raise some for a small, loyal group of customers. While I do raise beef and lamb, and have for many years, that is NOT the only crop from which we make our living. We are farmers and earn our livelihood farming, but the beef and lamb are a sideline now.
If I didn’t raise it myself, I would buy it from someone who does. Part of the reason is taste, and part is concern for our health.
I am not a neutral observer, as you observed. Who is, when it comes to the food they eat? My interest in this subject is not only personal, or at any rate, I am not just grinding my own ax and no one else’s. I think it’s really important to everyone and that people ought to know what they are eating.
Ah, but raising cattle on grass is less efficient, so you need more range land to raise the same number of cattle that could be feedlotted on a smaller plot.
Unless there is a fundamental shift in per capita beef consumption, a strong demand for grass feed beef would lead to a push for more land to be used in beef production.
Would the higher cost of grass fed beef generate the needed drop in per capita consumption to actually free up land? Maybe here in the US where land costs are high.
But what about in Central and South America, where they have lots of useless rain forest and grassland just sitting around, and a population eager to enter the world market? So, then, Central and South America start exporting lots of beef and making money hand over fist. Everyone is happy, right? Americans get the same amount of guilt free grass fed beef they want and disadvantanged countries get to improve their economies. Ah, but then those southern countries become interested in controlling pests, like locusts, who come yearly to eat those suddenly valuable grass fields. Having no regulations on the topic, looking for the cheaper solution, and being annoyed by policy input from first world countries, they use something really effective but cheap, like DDT. The locusts die, the swainson’s hawks, who migrated there specifically to eat the locusts, die, and the wildlife ecology of the swainson’s hawk’s breeding grounds, back in the US, is massively damaged. People freak out.
In short, the topic is complicated.
The corn fed to the feedlot cattle takes up enormous acreages, however. While the cattle stand still on piles of manure, someone, somewhere, is expending vast amounts of petroleum to grow and transport the corn. Corn cropping is hard on the soil, it is usually more like “mining” the land than farming.
Raising cattle on grass might be said to be “less efficient”, but the numbers can be squoze various ways. Grazing, properly managed, is, in its own way, quite efficient, and is not so hard on the environment.
It is true that the very quick weight gains are not matched on grass-fed as compared to grain-fed cattle. Is this necessarily a bad thing? There are issues of animal welfare involved in feedlotting, and certainly issues of human health.
It is, as you point out, a very complicated topic.