- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
In today’s media you can usually find some article or video condemning agriculture. Seems there are many people who feel they are experts on livestock and animal welfare and want the rest of us to know how pious and educated they are. I may not have a BSc in Animal Welfare or volunteer my time for organizations like PETA. I’m not even a little bit vegetarian either but I still feel that myself, along with many people raised and working within the agriculture sector, have the experience and frontline exposure, not to mention a deeper understanding of the industry, to be able to comment more fully on its issues. At least more fully than those undercover volunteers who seem to be all the rage these days.
The most basic rule that people need to understand about agriculture is that it is an industry and it supports many people with it’s profits. As with any industry, profits need to be made to pay the workers, and in order to make profits the industry has to meet a need. This is that lovely law of supply and demand. This means that if the agriculture industry is making a profit then it is successfully meeting the demand asked of it. Pretty simple so it makes sense that whenever one of those articles or videos appear there’s an outcry for people to become vegetarian or vegan. After all, take away the demand for meat and logically the need to supply it will dry up accordingly. Similar to if you take away the demand for milk (ha ha! I love puns!) Except it seems a bit drastic asking the population to all of a sudden remove such a large portion of their diet. Lets be a little more realistic with our logics here animal welfare people.
Feedlots, for example, have one purpose and one purpose only. To supply enough beef to keep those supermarket shelves full of those bright red cuts. Since demand is at an all time high and people want the prime cuts vs those not so prime ones (who can really blame them! Sorry round steak…), there is a huge cry for, not just a lot of beef, but a lot of animals. Just as a quick example, everyone seems to love a T-Bone right? Well the average 1,150 lb steer when butchered will supply… wait for it… about 9.8 lbs of T-Bone. That’s. It. People can use that up with one BBQ get together between friends so if they had a BBQ a week they would have required the slaughter of 3-4 animals in one month just to fuel their backyard fun. Crazy when you think about it that way really. While an entire carcass can supply a large amount of cuts, our demand for a select few leads to a large amount of ground beef and excess waste from those cuts we’ve deemed less convenient. (Who knows why dog food is so expensive when it’s just using those bits we don’t like. Dogs don’t have anything against the chuck!) Personally I can send one animal to the butcher and not even come close to emptying out my freezer in a year, yet the demand for cuts like those prime steaks requires a multitude of animals in comparison.
Why are these cuts the ones in demand? They’re handy. Convenient. Great on a BBQ. Now I’ll be the first to admit, cooking a roast requires a bit more foresight than I’m capable of applying at times. These tend to be the cuts that hang around my freezer to the bitter end but when proper preparation is applied you just can’t beat a slow cooked roast and veggies. Nobody wants to do this prep though. They want a pound or two of hamburger that’s easy to thaw and make into Hamburger Helper quickly or they want a nicely marbled steak that is made for quick searing over high heat. Something they can think of when they get home from work and accomplish in short order. None of this roast stuff and none of those cuts with poor marbling that only get tough and stringy when cooked quickly on high. Slow cooking is for people with nothing better to do than turn an oven on a few hours earlier! We don’t want marinated meat for suppleness, nor do we want slow cooked juicy goodness. We want a piece of meat that spits fat all over (why would you want this?! Obviously part of the reason for the drop in nude cooking these days.), and then we want to smother it in artificial flavouring from a bottle in our fridge. Makes sense doesn’t it.
This demand is what drives the feedlot industry. Not the fact that people eat meat, the fact that they want this type of meat.
So the world needs more animals to supply these less numerous cuts. The industry therefore feeds and finishes copious amounts of cattle. The world then wants these less numerous cuts to not be pieces of cardboard after they’re cooked quickly and dryly because nobody has time to spend more than half an hour in the kitchen. The industry therefore feeds large amounts of grain and supplements to grow faster and promote marbling in the meat thus supplying their own juices to make up for said dry cooking. The world also could care less what the meat tastes like and since they need such large numbers and quicker is better in supply theory, industrialized beef eschews the hanging and flavouring process personal beef is granted.
Feedlots and slaughterhouses have honed their practices to meet this supply and demand of meat completely. They give us what the people want. Instead of picketing people to stop eating meat and being cruel to animals by supporting this treatment with their purchases it seems that animal welfare groups would go much farther promoting smart consumerism. Advocate a better understanding of the supply of beef and maybe a drastic change would be seen within the beef sector. It could be amazing what effect a variety of meat cuts and a bit more time spent cooking them could have. Probably way more than videos showing people hitting cows with sticks. More sustainable farming isn’t a legend, it’s possible and it doesn’t require a life spent eating leeks and lentils instead. It simply requires a bit of education and a bit of concession on the part of the consumer. The industry will give them what they want because that is how they earn their profits. Consumers just need to want something a bit different.
@Blaithin kindly contributes blogs from an international perspective on an adhoc basis
The most basic rule that people need to understand about agriculture is that it is an industry and it supports many people with it’s profits. As with any industry, profits need to be made to pay the workers, and in order to make profits the industry has to meet a need. This is that lovely law of supply and demand. This means that if the agriculture industry is making a profit then it is successfully meeting the demand asked of it. Pretty simple so it makes sense that whenever one of those articles or videos appear there’s an outcry for people to become vegetarian or vegan. After all, take away the demand for meat and logically the need to supply it will dry up accordingly. Similar to if you take away the demand for milk (ha ha! I love puns!) Except it seems a bit drastic asking the population to all of a sudden remove such a large portion of their diet. Lets be a little more realistic with our logics here animal welfare people.
Feedlots, for example, have one purpose and one purpose only. To supply enough beef to keep those supermarket shelves full of those bright red cuts. Since demand is at an all time high and people want the prime cuts vs those not so prime ones (who can really blame them! Sorry round steak…), there is a huge cry for, not just a lot of beef, but a lot of animals. Just as a quick example, everyone seems to love a T-Bone right? Well the average 1,150 lb steer when butchered will supply… wait for it… about 9.8 lbs of T-Bone. That’s. It. People can use that up with one BBQ get together between friends so if they had a BBQ a week they would have required the slaughter of 3-4 animals in one month just to fuel their backyard fun. Crazy when you think about it that way really. While an entire carcass can supply a large amount of cuts, our demand for a select few leads to a large amount of ground beef and excess waste from those cuts we’ve deemed less convenient. (Who knows why dog food is so expensive when it’s just using those bits we don’t like. Dogs don’t have anything against the chuck!) Personally I can send one animal to the butcher and not even come close to emptying out my freezer in a year, yet the demand for cuts like those prime steaks requires a multitude of animals in comparison.
Why are these cuts the ones in demand? They’re handy. Convenient. Great on a BBQ. Now I’ll be the first to admit, cooking a roast requires a bit more foresight than I’m capable of applying at times. These tend to be the cuts that hang around my freezer to the bitter end but when proper preparation is applied you just can’t beat a slow cooked roast and veggies. Nobody wants to do this prep though. They want a pound or two of hamburger that’s easy to thaw and make into Hamburger Helper quickly or they want a nicely marbled steak that is made for quick searing over high heat. Something they can think of when they get home from work and accomplish in short order. None of this roast stuff and none of those cuts with poor marbling that only get tough and stringy when cooked quickly on high. Slow cooking is for people with nothing better to do than turn an oven on a few hours earlier! We don’t want marinated meat for suppleness, nor do we want slow cooked juicy goodness. We want a piece of meat that spits fat all over (why would you want this?! Obviously part of the reason for the drop in nude cooking these days.), and then we want to smother it in artificial flavouring from a bottle in our fridge. Makes sense doesn’t it.
This demand is what drives the feedlot industry. Not the fact that people eat meat, the fact that they want this type of meat.
So the world needs more animals to supply these less numerous cuts. The industry therefore feeds and finishes copious amounts of cattle. The world then wants these less numerous cuts to not be pieces of cardboard after they’re cooked quickly and dryly because nobody has time to spend more than half an hour in the kitchen. The industry therefore feeds large amounts of grain and supplements to grow faster and promote marbling in the meat thus supplying their own juices to make up for said dry cooking. The world also could care less what the meat tastes like and since they need such large numbers and quicker is better in supply theory, industrialized beef eschews the hanging and flavouring process personal beef is granted.
Feedlots and slaughterhouses have honed their practices to meet this supply and demand of meat completely. They give us what the people want. Instead of picketing people to stop eating meat and being cruel to animals by supporting this treatment with their purchases it seems that animal welfare groups would go much farther promoting smart consumerism. Advocate a better understanding of the supply of beef and maybe a drastic change would be seen within the beef sector. It could be amazing what effect a variety of meat cuts and a bit more time spent cooking them could have. Probably way more than videos showing people hitting cows with sticks. More sustainable farming isn’t a legend, it’s possible and it doesn’t require a life spent eating leeks and lentils instead. It simply requires a bit of education and a bit of concession on the part of the consumer. The industry will give them what they want because that is how they earn their profits. Consumers just need to want something a bit different.
@Blaithin kindly contributes blogs from an international perspective on an adhoc basis
