Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL MARCH 15, 2015 • www. aaalivestock . com
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Digest
Volume 57 • No. 3
Hurray For The Hamburger by Lee Pitts ou’re trying to do the right thing, using EPD’s, DNA, $5,000 range bulls, and all the tools at your disposal to produce the best beefsteaks money can buy. But what the consumer really wants is a good old fashioned hamburger, which, by the way, can be made with any old dairy cow, Mexican Corriente, Australian fat, or any combination thereof. The American rancher has made great strides since the 1970s when they were experimenting with a bevy of breeds in a rush to produce quantity, not quality. We paid for our sins by watching beef consumption in this country go from 90 pounds per person to barely over 50 pounds. I can vividly remember a great speech delivered by Hop Dickenson, the Hereford Association Executive Vice President back in the 1970s in which he said going out to dinner and ordering a steak was like playing Russian Roulette in that you had a one in six chance of getting a good steak. But now, thanks to a big infusion of Angus genetics and the conscientious job purebred and commercial cattlemen are doing, nearly two thirds of today’s feedlot fat cattle will grade USDA Choice. The only problem is, 62 percent of the beef Americans will consume this year will be in the form of hamburger. And you don’t need
Don’t worry about biting off more than you can chew. Your mouth is probably a lot bigger than you think.
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a Prime or high choice, yield grade one steer to produce that. We are a nation of burger eaters. And as hard as this may be to believe, many of the millennial generation, which is slowly displacing the baby boomers as the largest segment of consumers, would rather eat a good hamburger than they would a great steak. We are told constantly by industry big shots that what the consumer demands can only be produced by well-marbled Choice and Prime quality cattle. I know this will sound like heresy, but if we really are trying to produce what the consumer wants, perhaps we should also be producing high-
tonnage, least cost, leaner cattle to grind up for hamburger.
Our Hamburger Habit To satisfy the big, and getting bigger, demand for hamburger we face a huge obstacle: the cattle that are finished in feedlots are simply too fat to meet our growing hamburger habit. Or, at least, the meat left over after all the steaks and roasts are cut out, is too fat. And a surprisingly high amount of any carcass ultimately ends up as ground meat. This is true of all species. After all the pricier cuts are removed, 26 percent of a hog, 38 percent of a beef cow, 41 percent of a Holstein and 46 percent of of a lamb is ground up. The trim from fin-
ished feedlot cattle is known as “50s,” meaning it’s 50 percent fat and 50 percent lean beef. This fat ratio is too high to sell as hamburger without mixing in leaner products from grass-fed imports or older, leaner domestic cows which, currently, there aren’t enough of. To solve that problem we import billions of pounds of lean beef from grass-fed cattle from over 30 countries around the world. Just like a carton of apple juice, orange juice or milk, the product that the consumer buys as ground beef could be a mixture of hundreds of cattle. Ground beef is probably the most utilitarian food known to man; it can be used in a variety of products from Big Macs to tacos to spaghetti. The ground beef used in such meals is typically 80 percent beef and 20 percent fat, or 90 percent beef and 10 percent fat. This is the type of trim found in dairy cows and cattle from Australia and New Zealand. As long as we continue to shoot for an ideal animal that is mid-choice to prime, we will always have this continued on page two
Climate Change, Witch Hunts, Zombies, and more . . . BY DAN DAGGET, DANDAGGET.COM, FROM ECORADICAL TO CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALIST
ost likely you’ve suspected that the current flap over “climate change” isn’t the first time our society has been torn apart by a controversy over the weather and our alleged effect on it. And, of course, you’re right. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that one of the previous incarnations of this issue was one of the most infamous and shameful episodes in human history… That’s right, the infamous “witch hunts,” that wracked Europe from 1430 to 1650 and
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even extended into the New World in Salem, in what is now Massachusetts, were, to a significant degree, about climate change. One of the main “crimes” for which a number of humans estimated from 60,000 to more than a million (mostly women but a significant number of men, also) were hanged, burned at the stake, and tortured by a variety of other means (mostly in Europe) was “global cooling.” In a (London) Telegraph article dated February 7th, 2012, “Big Issue” columnist Brendan O’Neill wrote, “One of the key mad beliefs behind witch-hunting in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries was the idea that these peculiar creatures had warped
the weather, that they had caused “climate change.” Christian Pfister, Director of Business, Social, and Environmental History at the University of Bern, Switzerland, added, in an interview quoted in the 22 June 2013 Swiss newspaper Basler Zeitung, “Today we estimate that from 1430 to 1650 in Europe 60,000 women were executed as witches, not only because of, but most often because of weather-sorcery.” Historian Emily Oster, in Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe, writes that, “The most active period of the witchcraft trials (in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe) coincides with a period of lower than average
by LEE PITTS
Famous Cows hen I grow up I want to be curator of the Cow Hall of Fame. The only problem is I don’t think there is one. There’s a Hall of Fame for roadkill, roller derby, croquet, fish, bowling, robots, polka, hot dogs, candy, mascots, dogs, even insurance, for gosh sakes. Yet no Hall of Fame for cows! Sure, there’s fantastic Hall of Fame for cowboys but there’d be no cowboys if there were no cows. So where is the cow’s Hall? This is a pet project of mine I’ve thought about for years. It’s not right that for most Americans their only interaction with a bovine is when they eat a Whopper. A Cow Hall of Fame would change that. And when I say Cow Hall of Fame it’s just because it sounds catchier than Bovine Hall of Fame. My Hall would be for all cattle regardless of sex. Heck, I’ll even take Holsteins. I’m thinking lots of hides on the wall, a gift shop that sells cow mugs and plenty of interactive displays that sing the praises of the common cow. Or uncommon, in this case. There’d be an exhibit of things found in cow stomachs, weird cattle tools like burdizzos, and one on the evolution of the squeeze chute. (I’d donate mine as the oldest known.) I’d include a petting zoo of the American breeds and a display of all the things that come from a cow, from oleo to prophylactics. There’d be photos of the 800 breeds of cattle in the world, a live Longhorn with huge horns and a team of oxen pulling tourists around the grounds in a Conestoga wagon. For humor there’d be great cow cartoons from Ace Reid, Jerry Palen, Mad Jack, Earl, Rubes and the Far Side. For the kids there’d be a collection of cow mascots including Benny, the mascot for the Chicago Bulls, and Bevo of Texas Longhorn fame. Oil paintings would line the walls, only instead of people like you see at the Saddle and Sirloin Club, these paintings would be of
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