Omnivore - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 highlights the next great contradiction between the logic of nature and the logic of industry, the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) and the feeding of corn to cattle. Industrialization has turned the closed ecological loop of plants feeding animals which fertilize plants in pastoral farms to two problems: one of fertility in crop soil and one of feeding animals in CAFOs. Its all a matter of USDA policy, which has been implemented to get rid of the great pile of commodity corn that as accumulated because of government subsidized corn operations (to benefit to farmer or the food processing lobby?).

Calves need to be weaned on pastures of grass, which they have been evolutionary selected to do, until they get big enough to be shipped off to a CAFO. There, in high-density pens, they are fed a slush of number 2 corn, animal fat, and a cocktail of antibiotics and supplements. Aside from corn-fed cows having higher fat content and being less nutritional that grass-fed, it is not natural for cows to eat corn. For a rumen designed to process grass, corn produces unnatural gas pressure on internal organs leading to suffocation and acidification of the rumen leading to liver disease. The acidification also leads to the acid-resistance of bacteria that would normally be destroyed in the acid environment of the human stomach. All this in the name of government policy that seeks to get rid of the giant pile of corn brought on by subsidies.

Sadly, it all returns to petrochemicals and America's dependence on oil. The nitrates added in the corn feed to add nitrogen to their diet is synthetically derived and thus dependent on the Haber process as the commodity corn is. Decoupled from solar energy of grass-feeding, the industrialization of agriculture has been engineered to turn barrels of oil into beef. The side effects include the run-off of nitrogen and phosphorous from synthetic fertilizers and cow feces.