April 25th, 2011 Grass Fed ?

[Nirvana]

Frankly I don't buy beef at the super market because it tastes awful. Our beef is not exclusively corn fed and we are a small herd, no hormones or antibiotics here. Grass fed has no where near the flavor of beef with proper (corn fed) marbling. Grass fed is a marketing ploy and you pay a premium for a cheaper way to raise cattle. They also have to be fed longer.

The real problem with beef is that its expensive, politicians think its better to use corn for making ethanol which makes the price of beef skyrocket because subsides are paid to ethanol producers which is stupid when one realizes that saw grass is a better CHEAPER alternative.

What kind of feed grains are they feeding if they don't use corn? Sorghum? Barley? Wheat?

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Nirvana

snip--
politicians think its better to use corn for making ethanol which makes the price of beef skyrocket because subsides are paid to ethanol producers which is stupid when one realizes that saw grass is a better CHEAPER alternative.

--snip

those two sources of ethanol have other differences besides your "CHEAPER" claim that are substantial. getting ethanol from corn (sugar) is vastly easier than getting ethanol from sawgrass (cellulose). sawgrass might be cheaper to raise (not might--IS), but turning it into fuel is way, way more complicated.

[glatt]

And they just found another case of BSE in a cow in the USA. But really, everything is fine. Don't worry.

They are randomly testing only something like one out of every 12,000 bovines, the last I was able to confirm. And yet they keep turning up every couple of years.

It will be very interesting to see how old this dairy cow was. If it was born in the US after 1997, when it became illegal to grind up one cow and feed it to another cow, then that's going to be very bad news for the US beef industry. It would mean that the 1997 rules aren't working.

I think the only way to be sure that US beef is safe is to test more. When you only test 1 in 12,000 animals, you don't know jack.

[Nirvana]

And here again we are talking about a dairy cow with BSE not a beef cow. It does not follow the food chain in the same way as what you typically have on your plate. I am waiting to see the origin of this cow. The type of BSE it had was NOT transmissible from animal to animal and not to humans. {atypical] It was a cow taken to a rendering plant where typically that is made into fertilizer and dog food.

This is the first line of your article: {Health officials say the diseased cow never entered the human food chain and U.S. dairy and beef products are safe. It is the first confirmed case in the U.S. since 2006.}

I always find it annoying that those that sit behind a desk with no college education in agriculture or practical experience in agriculture can say the sky is falling. This article CLEARLY explains that the system in place is working.

Officials believe it is a rare spontaneous case and not linked to contaminated food. So no it was not fed other cows.

It seems like all it takes is one or two pencil pushers to create mass delusion. You are more likely to die of a heart attack eating too much beef than you are to get mad cow disease....

Most cattle slaughtered are 24 months old and under it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to have BSE. The disease has at least a 5-7 year incubation. That's why more are not tested. They only test OLD and sick appearing animals and most OLD and sick animals are in fertilizer.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by Nirvana

~snip~ I am waiting to see the origin of this cow. ~snip~

When a mommy cow and a daddy cow love each other verrrry much...

(Couldn't resist.)

~snip~You are more likely to die of a heart attack eating too much beef than you are to get mad cow disease....~snip~

Ain't that the truth!

http://www.13wham.com/guides/health/...Pr32YwSIg.cspx

[glatt]

Yes. And those officials aren't saying that to protect the US beef industry.

When you only test less than a hundredth of one percent of the animals, you can't credibly say anything about the safety of the US bovine population.

How crazy is it that they are finding any infected cows? I mean, when you test as little as they do, you would expect them to find nothing. But they keep popping up! How many more cases are out there that they never find?