Feedlots: The Uncensored Truth Part III — "It's what we do"
Thank you to our sponsor this week Woodland Ag: Quality Red Angus. Woodland Ag is located on the southern side of the Red River. For more information about Woodland’s quality red angus genetics or to just talk shop, call (903) 249-2515. Woodland Ag: Raise Em Right, Raise Em Red.
I would also like to say thank you to my brother, Evan Purviance, for helping me out with the audio this week, Maylene Frost from agreeing to share her story, and my dear friend Megan Cremer for helping me with some logistics.
After last week’s blog post, I hope that many of you have the itch to advocate for the industry. By sharing this video (or my podcast/blog post links) you are advocating for the industry, and potentially educating a consumer who needs it.
Please enjoy the following video, and don’t forget to share!
To all the ranchers, feeders, and farmers who read my blog post last week: take what I talked about (sharing the stories of agriculture) and apply that with this specific blog post. I know I’m preaching to the choir when I talk about feedlots, but the chances of you having a friend who doesn’t know much about a feedyard is pretty high — so share this story with them. You never know what a little truthful information could do to change their perspective.
Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize winner and one of my personal heroes, once said "civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply."
When I read that, I think to myself, ‘well yeah, obviously we can’t live without an adequate food supply.’ But then I think of the ways we need to achieve an adequate food supply — and some of those old-timey ag practices just don’t cut it like they did in the past.
Sure, I know many successful ranchers who raise their cattle on grass and they feed the world, but not all beef is raised on a few thousand acres of grass and hay. Statistically speaking, about half of all beef in our grocery stores was at one point or another at a feedlot. So, maybe it’s time we explore just exactly what a feedlot is.
“A feedlot is a facility that holds cattle and feeds them while caring for them to raise them to whatever the producer desires: whether it’s to grow them, get them ready to breed, go back on pasture, or fatten them to get them ready for slaughter,” Maylene Frost of Centana Feeders in Edgar, Montana said. “It’s basically a facility where we can help the cattle grow to achieve their ultimate goal.”
Frost and her husband manage a feedlot in South Central Montana. Frost herself has been working with cattle for decades and knows her way around a feedlot, I was able to visit with her at Centana back in May.
“It's exciting to me to see what you can help the animal do to achieve its goal or the goal that you set for that animal. Cattle are designed to feed us and to provide milk for us — that’s what God designed them for. And it's really exciting to be able to step out there and say, ‘look what we can do, how many people we can feed with how few of resources we can do it with.’”
Last year, Centana Feeders produced 27.3 million pounds of beef. To put that into perspective, Frost said a good carcass weight (the amount of beef taken from that animal once it’s slaughtered) coming out of Centana is around 800 pounds… that’s a lot of cattle.
“There's not enough grass out there to feed that many animals, there's no way you could do that. Number one, there's not that much grass out there. If there was that much grass out there, it would take three times as long to get the animal to that body weight to be able to produce that many pounds of meat as it does to feed them a highly concentrated and high carbohydrate diet here in the feed lot,” Frost said. “So in order to feed the world — which is what we do, and not just the U.S., but to feed the world — we have to have the capability to bring those animals and feed them to produce the beef a little faster than you would out on the pasture. And it does more things than just produce beef…”
Contrary to popular belief, producing beef this way (in a feedlot) actually reduces our carbon footprint. Frost said with less cattle on less land, you use less water while you produce beef faster than you normally would. I know movies like the popular ‘Cowspiracy’ want us to believe feedlots are monsters of carbon emissions, but in reality, the statement that feedlots are worse for then environment than raising cattle on thousands of acres of grass is completely false.
“People say it hurts our environment; it's actually helping our environment. The only way we could do anything different is if people quit eating beef… and we don't want that, you don't want to quit eating,” Frost said with a chuckle. “If you do quit eating beef, you have to get your protein source somewhere else. And farming soybeans for your protein is not an option. You would increase your carbon footprint and there's not enough farm ground out there to get that much protein to replace the beef. There's really no other viable option that's good for the planet and good for the people.”
Switching gears, Frost went on to defend another common misconception with feedlots: the idea that fed cattle are not cared for properly.
“The care that we give them is extremely important. It makes them happier and healthier; it makes our job easier,” Frost said. “The happier we can keep them, the healthier they stay, and the better our bottom line is. So, there's a lot of things that we do to keep the animals happy that makes them healthy.”
Frost explained in detail the amount of time and consideration which goes into getting a specific animal acclimated to the feedyard. First, cattle are introduced to a smaller pen and given a ration (a mixture of grains to fatten cattle up) in a feed bunk (a giant concrete feed trough where the ration is delivered) and shown where the water tanks are located in said pen. Once they have adjusted to their environment, Centana Feeders will process the cattle, meaning they will give them individual identification and a record. Anything done to the individual animal can be recorded and looked back on at a later time.
“We look at the cattle multiple times a day, just driving the bunk lines and looking at the cattle in the pen, observing them without any pressure on them, without anyone in their pen, just observing them,” Frost added. “If we see anything that needs attention, then we will go back in the pen, pull that animal out and give it appropriate attention.”
By appropriate attention, she means if any animals look sickly, they will remove it from its pen and doctor it accordingly. They do this multiple times a day, every single day — even on holidays.
Frost concluded by talking about how important feeding cattle is to the feeder.
“They're [the cattle] our first priority. It's what we do, it's our life. It's not a job, it's our livelihoods,” Frost said. “I don't think people realize that. I don't think people realize what we do to put food on the table and what all that entails.”
Frost explained something ranchers, farmers, and feeders know all too well: there are no days off. Producers are on call 24/7, 365 days a year, including weekends and holidays — and even if you’re not technically at work, you’re thinking about it. In most cases, a person with this type of work-life balance would be considered a workaholic, but for producers, it’s a way of life.
“It bothers me when people who don't know say that we’re mean to the animals or that we abuse them because nothing is farther from the truth,” Frost said. “And I would invite anyone who thinks that to visit with a local rancher, visit a feedyard, go find out for yourself. Educate yourself, go there firsthand and see what it is. I guarantee you, 99 percent of the people who do this for a living want you to know what they do and how they treat the animals and what all goes into it. No one has anything to hide. They want you to know because they're passionate about it, it's their life. That's what they chose to do and they're passionate about what they do and the animals. If you didn't love the animals, if you didn't care for them, you wouldn't be here doing this; there’s no way.”
The biggest takeaway from my visit to Centana Feeders with Maylene Frost was that it takes way more work to run a feedlot than most people think or even know. The amount of time spent diligently caring for these animals in the most ethically- and environmentally-sound way possible is mind blowing to me.
My visit with Frost reassured me that in a world of anti-ags who try to get us down, we’re still fighting for our industry, just like we always have and always will because, as Frost said many times, “it’s what we do.”
