Do you really know what the animals you buy for meat eat... chicken, beef, pork, turkey, fish, etc.

For some reason, I thought after all the mad cow scares and meat recalls the FDA had banned the feeding of chicken litter (crap) to beef cattle. I was wrong. It is SO GROSS to even think about! Oh my was I wrong.

We were getting a load of pine bark mulch for the berry plants a week ago and the driver said he had really been busy with chicken house clean-outs. A clean out can be one of two things. A scraping of the top layers of pine shavings, waste feed, ammonia, and chicken crap, plus andy dead chickens, rats or other dead animals that decomposed into the chicken house floor, or other stuff that falls on the floor like nails, wire or glass. It can also be a total clean out down to the dirt floor of the poultry house. Different chicken producers do it differently. Some require a total clean out every five batches of chickens while others let it build up to as many as fifteen batches. Chicken growers often take off the top layers pretty often and sell it for extra income. In any case, the stuff is pretty rank. The driver said that the clean out material (poultry litter) is greatly desired by cattle feed-lot facilities. I was really shocked. He said the cattle love to eat this crap mixture.

The University of Missouri has an article that treats feeding this crap to cattle as a normal way of doing business for cattlemen. Apparently the FDA approved feeding chicken litter-crap to cattle in 2005. The Bovine has an article that takes a different approach and opposes feeding this stuff to cattle that produce beef we buy in the grocery store. Care2 suggests that up to a billion pounds of this product is fed annually in cattle feed lots. As a final point, Consumers Union has filed for a ban by the FDA and details why this is an important issue for consumers of beef.

If you want to take action, check out this link for a way to voice your concern, and write your Senator and Congressman. There is also a video at this link. The FDA has to follow laws if passed by Congress and signed by the President. I sort of suspect if it ever came to a vote, even Congress would not have the guts to approve chicken crap as a feed for beef animals.

Poultry litter also is used as a fertilizer. A lot of it, especially from deep cleanings, ends up spread on pastures animals graze on. The pro side of this is fairly straight forward. Fertilizer is expensive and chicken litter saves money. The view of those that see problems with water and land pollution by the use of chicken litter is explained in this article. The Rocky Branch Grass Ranch had 1.2 million pounds of this poultry litter spread on it the year before we purchased it. We have never used it on any of our land. I think the problems out weight the cost savings. The biggest concern I have is arsenic in chicken feed. This is in chicken feed and eventually in the litter from chickens. Not enough is known about this to not be too careful.

We raise our own beef to eat and are raising our own chickens to eat. After finding out that most of the beef in the store has been produced using some chicken crap, I will not be buying any beef when we run out of a cut. We will do without or I will find it from another producer using natural production methods.