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.

One of the most commonly asked questions concerning grass fed beef is “How does it taste?” or the alternative question of “Is it really tough?”  What I have always believed in marketing our beef through American Grass Fed Beef is that you may convince people to try it once for the health benefits or some of the altruistic benefits (humane handling, sustainable agriculture) but they won’t buy it again if it is not good. 

I have always gauged our success not so much by the growth of new customers who seek out our beef but by the repeat customers who return to us month after month.  The success of our Buyer’s Club is the best indicator of the success of the grass fed beef we produce. 

Eating Well: There’s More to Like About Grass-Fed Beef

FROM Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester County and Sparky’s All-American Food in New York to Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Acme Chophouse in San Francisco, more diners are switching to rich, juicy and tender grass-fed beef, which is fast losing its reputation as tough and tasteless but good for you. 

My own delicious research shows the industry has taken giant steps. When I wrote about grass-fed beef in 2002 there were about 50 producers, and most of what they raised was not very good. Now there are about 1,000 of them, and after I grilled rib-eyes from 15 producers for friends, it was clear that more of them are learning to get it right.

As I stated in this article the newly emerging grass fed industry is rapidly growing due in most part to the increased attention from various media sources.  More consumers are becoming enlightened as to the differences and benefits of choosing grass fed beef over factory farmed industrial beef.

The majority of grass fed beef is produced on small family farms where they take pride in the care and quality of the product.  Though grass fed still constitutes a small niche market it is exciting to see the increasing number of farms that are looking to niche marketing directly to consumers as a means to breathe new life into the financial viability of these farms.  It is this direct connection to the farm that many consumers are looking for and many producers are willing to offer.

Grass-fed beef worth the wait for many
By Jane Snow Aug. 16, 2006
McClatchy News Service

Akron, Ohio - Cattle graze peacefully on David and Deanna McMaken's farm near Waynesburg in Carroll County. From the time they're born until they become hamburger, the animals wander through pastures, munching grass and slowly gaining weight.

That's how cattle were raised a century ago, but rarely today, when most are weaned from grass at an early age and fattened on grains in feedlots. The McMakens' Rose Ridge Farm is one of a handful in Ohio producing grass-fed beef. But at the rate the industry is growing, you're going to be seeing a lot more of this meat.

Grass-fed beef became so popular with customers at Krieger's in the Akron, Ohio, area, that it's now the only kind the market sells.

"They say they like it better," Krieger meat cutter Rob Fink said.

The beef is touted as a wonder meat that's up to 50 percent lower in fat than regular beef, higher in vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids, environmentally friendly and humanely produced. Some researchers even claim it can help prevent cancer and help you lose weight.

Some of the nutrition claims may be premature, but the meat is indeed more healthful than regular beef, experts say. It's also tougher and some of it is less flavorful than regular beef, although farmers are working on that.

The American Grass Fed Conference in Colorado Springs in July was well attended by the media.  The following article was published in the Denver Post after the conference.  It includes my comments concerning grass fed beef.

Ranchers of grass-fed beef talk up its virtues

By Ellen Sweets
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com

Colorado Springs - "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser, in examining how to restore the disconnect between farm and table, wasted no time getting to the point as he spoke to the third annual American Grassfed Association conference held here last weekend.

"It should come as no surprise that American beef can't be sold in Japan, Korea and the European Union," he said. "A recent report showed that 75 percent of Japanese consumers didn't want to eat American beef because the USDA has succeeded in giving American meat a bad name. This room is the solution."