This HAS to be a joke.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/ ... 5N20120923
feedings cows gummy worms?!
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Nope, that's no joke. That practice has been common for as long as I can remember, (and I can remember a long way back past the middle of the last century. LOL).
Bakeries, for example, sell day-old bread at a discount at their local outlet stores, but after that, it's sold at salvage prices to some feedlot owner, in order to recover the nutrients in the bread, rolls, cookies, etc. It would be incredibly wasteful to throw away out of date food, and it would just fill up the landfills much faster, when it can be recycled for other purposes in livestock feed. Such items aren't just fed willy-nilly — rations are precisely calculated and formulated by sophisticated computerized feed-processing equipment to provide the livestock with a very accurate optimized balance of all the various nutrients necessary for optimum health, so that production of milk, meat, or whatever, is always optimized, regardless of what the input ingredients might be on any particular day. Every necessary trace element is present in the ration, in every batch. Most of us just guess at our ration each day (as far as nutrient content is concerned), but livestock feeders never guess, they use equipment that removes all the guesswork, because guesses can be way too expensive in production agriculture.
The kind of grass you have on your yard will barely keep a cow alive, and it takes a long, long time to grow out beef on low protein pasture, because it's so marginal, from a nutritional aspect. That translates into expensive beef production, because it costs money to maintain that cow. Cows are an expensive investment these days. Nothing is cheap anymore, not even dirt.
Tex
Bakeries, for example, sell day-old bread at a discount at their local outlet stores, but after that, it's sold at salvage prices to some feedlot owner, in order to recover the nutrients in the bread, rolls, cookies, etc. It would be incredibly wasteful to throw away out of date food, and it would just fill up the landfills much faster, when it can be recycled for other purposes in livestock feed. Such items aren't just fed willy-nilly — rations are precisely calculated and formulated by sophisticated computerized feed-processing equipment to provide the livestock with a very accurate optimized balance of all the various nutrients necessary for optimum health, so that production of milk, meat, or whatever, is always optimized, regardless of what the input ingredients might be on any particular day. Every necessary trace element is present in the ration, in every batch. Most of us just guess at our ration each day (as far as nutrient content is concerned), but livestock feeders never guess, they use equipment that removes all the guesswork, because guesses can be way too expensive in production agriculture.
Have you priced any grass or hay lately? Trust me, it's quite expensive these days, and believe it or not, a 1,200 pound cow, with a nursing calf, will eat from 150 to 200 pounds of grass per day. That's a hell of a lot of grass, because a bushel of grass doesn't weigh much. It takes somewhat less hay, but hay is much more expensive than grass, so it's an even more expensive option. And cattle won't gain much weight on grass or hay, unless it's improved pasture, (such as wheat pasture, or haygrazer forage).Zizzle wrote:Why not feed them grass and hay if corn is so darn expensive?!???
The kind of grass you have on your yard will barely keep a cow alive, and it takes a long, long time to grow out beef on low protein pasture, because it's so marginal, from a nutritional aspect. That translates into expensive beef production, because it costs money to maintain that cow. Cows are an expensive investment these days. Nothing is cheap anymore, not even dirt.
Tex
It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.