Food Alliance may start inspections under new grass-fed standard by May
 
by Sustainable Food News
February 20, 2008

The American Grassfed Association (AGA) said Wednesday its board has voted to start certifying grass-fed meat operations under a new industry-backed standard administered by Food Alliance, owner one of the most comprehensive agricultural eco-labels in North America.

“We can now begin the process of developing the audit protocols that will allow our members to certify their farms and ranches as grassfed,” AGA Beef Director Will Harris told Sustainable Food News.

The AGA represents more than 300 grassfed livestock producers. FA certifies farms, ranches, food processors and distributors for sustainable agriculture certification, which addresses labor conditions, humane animal care, and environmental stewardship.

Certified businesses can use the green, FA eco-label on its products to show off social and environmental responsibility.

FA Executive Director Scott Exo told SFN earlier that it could his group could start taking applications and undertaking inspections of producers wishing to be AGA-certified by May.

AGA’s grass-fed marketing claim standard is intended to exceed the requirements for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s grass-fed standard announced in October, which allows animals confined to feedlots, given antibiotics and growth hormones to still be labeled ‘grass-fed’ as long as they were fed a forage diet.

On Sunday a California meat company issued the largest beef recall in history.  This recall by Westland-Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California comes after an undercover video by the Humane Society was distributed.  The video shows workers kicking, shocking, and pushing crippled and sick animals with forklifts. Some animals that were unable to stand even had water sprayed down their noses.  You can see this video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OjhPVL48Ks&NR=1  and at https://community.hsus.org/campaign/CA_2008_investigation?qp_source=gaba89.

This certainly has been the age of beef recalls; each one seems to be bigger than those prior.  The Topps recall this year was huge but this current recall of 143 million pounds is the largest in history.  It is 4 times bigger than the previous record of 35 million pounds by Thorn Apple Valley in 1999.  Contamination of our food supply by E.coli 0157:H7 (the deadly pathogenic form) or salmonella have been in the news all year and certainly a source of concern.  There were 21 recalls due to E.coli 0157:H7 last year which in itself is significantly higher than the 8 in 2006 and 5 in 2005.  However, this current recall brings an already shaky red meat consumer to question the very core of the livestock industry.

Further, this time the recall is for beef harvested from downer cows which could pose a threat of mad cow disease.  A downer cow is one that though alive is not ambulatory prior to harvesting.  Symptoms of mad cow disease may present as showing neurological signs of ataxia and paralysis.   Slaughter of downer cows has not been allowed since the occurrence of the threat of mad cow disease.  It is prohibited to harvest an animal that cannot stand unless it is for reasons of an acute injury such as a broken leg.  But even then the USDA veterinary inspectors on hand are to pass judgment on these animals.  The USDA has strict rules under the 1958 Humane Slaughter Act as to the humane treatment of animals including downers. 

The current recall is considered a Class II recall, indicating that the chance of there actually being a health hazard is remote.  The USDA has explained that there is little health risk from this meat because the animals had passed ante-mortem inspection prior to going down.  In addition, the officials noted that it is required that the brains and spinal cords (called SRM – specified risk materials) from any of these animals would have been removed as required since it is believed that these are the areas most likely to harbor the disease and therefore would not have entered the food supply.  A Class I recall would indicate that consumption of the product would pose a serious health problem or death.  Such has been the case in some of the E.coli outbreaks.

Of great concern to many consumers and consumer advocate groups is the fact that nearly a quarter of all the recalled beef had been sent to the school lunch program and that most of it had already been consumed.  It has caused many of these groups to question the efficacy of our food safety system.  These groups charged that the USDA should do a better job of ensuring that questionable beef does not enter our food chain.

While consumers, beef industry spokesmen, processing industry spokespersons and producers all agree that the in-humane actions of workers at this particular facility are to be condemned the question is posed by many as to whether this is just an extraordinary and egregious incident or if it is indicative of a larger, industry-wide problem.  Of consumers and customers who contact us through our website one frequently asked question has to do with the manner in which we slaughter our animals and whether it is humane.  Many consumers come to grassfed and pasture raised meats that are sourced directly from small-scale family farms for the health benefits and safety issues.  However, the umbrella of interest in pasture based agriculture goes beyond these attributes to include those folks who are not opposed to eating meat but want to make absolutely sure that the livestock is cared for, transported and harvested in a humane manner.  Additionally, there are some who come for the environmental issues. 

For this reason, we decided some time ago to have third party verification of our humane pastured raised management at the farm, when the animals are transported and when they go through the harvest process.  We are very proud to have passed two humane audits.  We bear a certificate of approval from the American Humane Association as well as Steritech.  We feel that this gives extra assurance to our customers that we are passionate about the well being of our animals.

My advice to consumers who are concerned about this revelation of animal abuse at a facility in California not extend the judgment to all animal harvesting facilities.  The proverbial, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bath...” need not apply and the consumer stop eating meat altogether.  Please continue to enjoy the health benefits of beef but investigate from where it is sourced.  Choose small-scale family farms that personally care for their animals on open pastures.  Choose meats that are processed in third party audited facilities where the humane treatment is a priority.

This article appeared in The Mother Earth News
August/September 2007
Alison Rogers 

It's the middle of August, time to gather your friends for that barbeque you've been promising to host all summer. But before you run to the grocery store for a couple pounds of ground beef for the hamburgers, consider this: There's a healthier, safer, better-tasting alternative. One that supports small-scale farms, a healthy eco-system and the animals' welfare. That alternative is grass-fed beef.

While most of the beef found in supermarkets is an engineered commodity, far removed from the source of protein and other essential nutrients it formerly represented, many producers are revisiting the 'grass roots' of the business and bringing us better beef. There are lots of reasons to seek out a grass-fed beef supplier in your area ? Here are five of them:

1. Grass-fed beef is low in saturated fat, yet high in omega-3 fatty acids, beta carotene, vitamin E, folic acid and antioxidants. Conjugated linoleic acid, thought to reduce the risk of breast cancer and diabetes, also is higher in pastured beef.

2. Grass-fed cattle don't require regular administration of antibiotics to combat the spread of infection that is common in densely packed feedlots. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 70 percent of the antibiotics and similar drugs produced in the United States are used on livestock, creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria that health facilities are finding hard to treat.

3. Grass-fed beef production practices do not typically include the injection of hormones to spur growth. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved six different kinds of steroidal hormones for use in food production, according to a report from Cornell University, and many are concerned that these pharmaceuticals increase the risk of breast cancer and reproductive problems in humans. (Wildlife, too, is affected ? the hormones are present in cattle waste and end up in creeks, rivers, lakes and ponds.)

4. Grass-fed beef is much less likely to harbor acid-resistant E.coli. A diet consisting primarily of grain creates an acidic condition in a cow's digestive system, and the bacteria that survive this pH level are resistant to a human's stomach acid. The result is not pretty. However, a natural diet of grass does not create this acidic environment, and study after study has confirmed that there is much less E. coli in grass-fed meat products. (Read News from Mother: Why Grass Fed is Best for more information.)

5. Grass-fed cattle herds have never been affected by Mad Cow Disease. Large confined feeding operations will add just about anything to the feed they use in order to produce the most weight gain in the shortest time possible. Sometimes this includes processed cattle brains, which is how the disease is spread.

When I attended vet school at the University of Tennessee it really stuck in my head that the indiscriminate use of antibiotics would one day pay a toll on our world.  I had a microbiology professor who had been through WW2 and returned to the United States with a serious case of tuberculosis.  He was placed in a sanatorium and isolated.  His dramatic and engaging story of what then happened has always stayed with me.  As a part of the armed forces he was offered to take part of a study using new experimental drugs to treat TB.  He readily jumped at the chance as it provided him his only hope.  At that time something like 4 of 5 patients with tuberculosis did not survive.  He was one of the first to receive a new class of drugs known as antibiotics, in this case streptomycin.  My professor was critically ill by the time they began to administer this new drug.  The effect was almost immediately impressive.  His advanced disease was visibly arrested almost overnight. The bacteria disappeared from his sputum and he made a rapid recovery.  It was truly a miracle drug.  The purpose he had in sharing this touching personal story was to impress on us the wonder of antibiotics when they first came on the scene and at the same time to strongly impress upon us that their indiscriminate use had the potential of throwing us back into the dark ages when antibiotic-resistant bacteria reared its head, a super-bug.    

I never forgot the story and through out my career and life had only used antibiotics when they were truly indicated.  This article by Michael Pollan is certainly worthwhile to consider. 

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published New York Times: December 16, 2007

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

I have always found it interesting that so many of our customers are reformed vegetarians who have rediscovered the benefits to their health of including red meat, specifically beef, in their diets.  In point of fact, our website master is the person most critical in convincing us to market our grassfed beef direct to the consumer.  She called one night and wanted to buy a cow, very interesting since she lives in the suburbs of Atlanta and not where you would raise a rabbit much less a cow.  She had visited our farm in the past as a confirmed vegetarian (14 years) so I couldn’t figure her desire for a cow, never dreamed she meant beef.  Yet, long term deficiencies had prompted her doctor to recommend she go back to red meat.

I say this to explain how odd it may seem that I should be writing about the consumption of offal.  Our farm primarily sells beef muscle cuts.  Yet, offal is a misunderstood and improperly maligned part of a beef carcass.  So, while many of our customers are rediscovering beef many more should be encouraged to discover offal.

Offal (pronounced aw-ful) is a nearly complete class of food in itself, encompassing all manner of things such as heart, liver, kidneys, glands, stomach, testicles, lungs, and entrails of an animal and even includes tail, feet, head, ears, etc.  The work offal comes from the Old English “off” and “fall”, referring to the pieces that fall from an animal carcass during butchering.  The dictionary defines offal as waste parts, especially of a butchered animal or refuse; rubbish.  How unfair since many of these organs have much to offer nutritionally as well as gustatorially.
In most of the world organ meat is readily used as part of the culture’s traditional cuisine and reflects a resourcefulness and economy aimed to use all of animal protein as gainfully as possible. They like our prehistoric ancestors instinctively prize the richly nourishing organ meats of the animals they consume.   They have an appreciation for low-in-fat, vitamin-and-mineral-rich hearts, tongues, kidneys, sweetbreads, etc.  If you are going to harvest it, then use it all.  However, offal has never been a favorite with American fare which at best views it somewhat squeamishly.  We would rather put it into rendering plants than open our minds and entertain its use as a rich and delicate part or our diet.  Organ meats compared to muscle meats are much higher in iron, zinc, vitamin B12, folate and vitamin A (liver).

It is my opinion that if you do choose to try offal in some way that you choose from an animal that has been raised in a pristine environment and will offer the greatest amount of nutritional value and safety (especially the liver) by selecting from grassfed animals who have never had antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, etc.

It is not my intent to instruct you in the cooking techniques and recipes for preparation of offal, perhaps we will do that later.

However, viscera (offal, organ meat) is gaining a foothold in restaurants and kitchens in the last few years broadening the tastes of American diners.  In fact, many of the best chefs list offal as one of their favorite meals to cook and eat.

One of the premier restaurants in St. Louis did this recently with our beef hearts.

http://www.stlbites.com/2008/02/02/in-regards-to-the-forum-you-were-right

I am not a chef but I can tell you how to prepare kidney, heart, tongue, sweetbreads and mountain oysters (testicles).  We do not even have these organs on our website and they require special orders.  Feel free to call us if you have a request.