Just to add a little clarity, beef cattle all start eating grass and generally continue for a large portion of their life. It’s just whether or not they are “finished” on grass or grain. I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”
I thought all feed lots were exclusively grain only? When driving past one in Colorado I didn't see any grass anywhere the animals could access, just a ton of muddy ground.
Speaking of dairy farms with muddy lots and no grass in sight, they feed TMR (total mixed ration). It's a mixture of ground hay (dried grass!), corn silage (chopped fermented grass!), grain, and trace minerals and vitamins, adjusted on a regular basis by a nutritionist.
Beef cattle historically have started on milk, and then moved to pasture.
In industrialised countries, beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives. Perhaps for marketing reasons, I'm not sure, in some places, for some percentage of the herd, they're finished on pasture.
Most CAFOs, as others have noted, are primarily started and completed with grain.
Just to underscore the reason I felt the need to clarify, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim there are any cattle fed grain for “all” of their life. Like the previous statement about “exclusively grain fed diets”, it’s either needlessly hyperbolic or misleading.
" ... beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives."
AIUI, CAFO-destined cattle are moved into feeding lots as soon as they're weaned -- say at a couple of months old. They're mostly on milk, with some grass, up to that point. But from that point on they're on grain-only.
You said:
> I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”
and subsequently
> My understanding is that these feedlots are where cattle are housed for the last few months to gain weight before slaughter.
This doesn't align with my understanding.
Once within a CAFO, the cattle stay there until slaughter -- say at age 18 months or less. During that time they're fed exclusively grain, as this ensures maximum growth / minimum time / best ratio of input cost to sale price / etc.
Some may be finished on pasture, as this is an increasingly profitable market, plus it drastically reduces pathogens within the animal, and improves the flavour (so I'm told).
I think I understand where you’re coming from and I’m willing to bet you understand the nuance but my concern was mainly for the uninitiated reading and drawing too drastic of a conclusion.
I think the USDA info I read was that the “typical” cattle are pasture raised for around 4 months before going to a feedlot. Once there, the feed may be as high as 90-95% grain. At that point it almost feels pedantic to claim they are anything but grain fed, but a purely grain diet can cause them to founder like horses on grass as another commenter said.
Sure, and reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma -- which is where I first really got a good insight into these factories -- you'll discover that while corn may not be precisely 100% of the feed, chicken sweepings (manure, feather), peanut shells, fat from other slaughtered cows, etc make up a portion too.
CAFOs are objectively horrendous, and I don't want an 'uninitiated reader' thinking they're anything less than a woeful embarrassment for our species.
I’m not trying to defend feedlots. Unfortunately I think if we aren’t careful about being accurate people are more likely to write off those opinions as pushing a narrative at the expense of truth, ultimately making good points lose relevance
Okay, so let's agree that cattle that end up in feedlots spend the vast majority of their time in feedlots ... they may have some milk and grass for the first few months of their life, but once they're in feedlots they're on primarily (90%+) grain, with some even more obviously dubious additions making up the other 10%.
These are animals that have evolved to digest various grasses, and get sick (to various degrees) when they eat any amount of grains.
Feeding them almost (is that okay?) exclusively grains makes them extremely sick - but happily (?) the high-grain diet ensures they put on fat (the bad kind, btw) fast enough that we can slaughter them before they have the opportunity to die from this diet.
People that find this acceptable only because they dispute a few percentile of grain quotient in the feed are unlikely to be swayed in any case, I suspect.
I agree with everything you said until the last sentence. I think the issue is it's a lot to ask of someone to change their lifestyle, especially within areas that have a lot of contradictory (mis)information.
The easy choice is for someone to side with their confirmation bias ("what I'm doing is already ok"). As soon as they sniff out some misinformation in the counterargument, I think the arguing party loses credibility and any hope of convincing them otherwise. ("If you're willing to fudge the facts on that, what else are you misrepresenting?") It's not a matter of being pedantic, it's a matter of trust.
You see this with all kinds of controversial topics. Agriculture, nutrition, climate science etc. People will latch on to any misrepresented information as use it to discredit an otherwise well-reasoned argument. I just think it's best to clean up the point to avoid that risk.
I'm enchanted by your suggestion that if we can just give everyone enough facts they'll start to act thoughtfully.
I'll continue to blend my understanding of reality with my opinion of same. If it's insufficiently compelling in comparison to someone's desire to believe something demonstrably wrong or bad, as I said earlier, I'm doubtful those last few eggshells will make a difference.
>I'm enchanted by your suggestion that if we can just give everyone enough facts they'll start to act thoughtfully
That's not really what I said though. I know there's some people who think this (ahem Peter Attia) but it flies in the face of my own experience and what limited reading I've done in behavioral psychology.
I don't think people act as rational agents objectively assessing each piece of information. Which is all the more reason to believe they will dismiss any of your points if you give them reason to maintain their confirmation bias. When we aren't accurate with our statements of "fact", it opens the door to exactly that.
There's lots of people who do that. While it may fuel their feelings of self-righteousness, I have doubts as to whether it actually changes anyone's mind. To the contrary, I tend to believe it just makes the other side more entrenched in their own ideas.
