AgWired

The Cattle Industry Summer Conference was more than committee and board meetings. Education was a key element to help arm attendees with facts and figures they can take home and use in everyday conversations with familiy, friends and complete strangers about beef.

Chuck spoke with Dr. Jude Capper, Livestock Sustainablity Consultant, after she presented a talk on common myths about beef. She truly put the numbers into context for the audience and stated, “If we have no context then we have no way to assess if these numbers are big or small.” Here are a few of the myths she busted that will allow us all to talk beef with anyone and be able to explain it practically.

Beef’s Carbon Footprint

“We have a perception out there that modern ag is killing the planet. For example, cattle cause global warming, if we went meatless every Monday we could save the planet and still drive our Hummer. If we use Meatless Monday’s as an example, as a contribution to national carbon footprint, meat only contributes 2.1% so the other 97.9% comes from everything else we do. The perception is if we all went meatless, all 330 million people in the states, we could save the planet. But actually if we did that every Monday for a whole year it would cut out national carbon footprint by less than 1/3 of 1%. So really it isn’t that big of a deal, but people really think it is”

Hormones in Beef

“Hormones in beef. There are so many conversations about, “Well, I don’t feed my kids beef and dairy now because kids are growing bigger and developing faster and it’s because of the hormones used in the beed and dairy industry.” And it is true that beef from an implanted steer has more estrogen in it then beef from an non-implanted steer. But the quantities are still are really tiny. If we put that into context with the birth control pill thats taken by 100 million females every single day globally, each one of those tiny little pills contains 35,000 nano grams of estrogen. So to get the amount of estrogen from beef as you do from one tiny little pill, each female would have to eat more than 2,000 lbs. of beef per day.”

Grain-fed vs. Grass-fed

“If we look at grass-fed vs. corn-fed beef, for example. The assumption is that feedlots are bad, we need to do away with them, we need to make all of our beef grass-fed. And it is a great system. But if we want to make the 27 billion pounds of beef that we produce every year from grass-fed system we are going to need more then 65 million more cattle in the national herd. We are going to need an extra area of land, more than 75% of the land area of Texas, a huge amount of more land. We are going to need water equivalent to adding 53 million households to the staves and the carbon emissions extra to make the same amount of beef will be the same as adding 27 million cars to the roads every year.”

Listen to Chuck’s interview with Jude here: Interview with Jude Capper

Here are photos from the event:2013 Cattle Industry Summer Conference Photo Album