Here is a copy of the complaint letter I am e-mailing to the major grocery stores near me. Feel free to copy it if you like and e-mail to the grocery stores near you. Or better yet, make up your own letter. And please, do yourselves and everybody else a favor; post this letter or one like it on every garden and food forum out there! Let's try to save some lives, people.


To Whom It May Concern,

I'm not buying any more beef from your stores. With well over 21.7 million pounds of hamburger recalled in the last few months because of possible E.coli O157:H7 contamination, I'd like to know when the big stores like you are going to wise up? If you were not part of the last big recall, don't hold your breath. You will be. Here are the facts:

E.coli

Strain E. coli 0157:H7 is associated with human illness and death as a foodborne illness. A study by Cornell University has determined that grass-fed animals have far fewer E. coli (approx. 300 times less) than their grain fed counterparts. Also in the same study, the amount of E. coli they do have is much less likely to survive our first line of defense against infection, our stomach acid. This is because feeding cattle grain makes their digestive tract abnormally acid, and over time, the 'bad E. coli' has become acid-resistant. So if we ingest them in our food a large number of them can potentially survive our stomach acid and go on to grow in our gut, causing an infection. Since the Cornell study in 1998 many groups have tried to contest the results. A study by the USDA Meat and Animal Research Center in Lincoln Nebraska (2000) has confirmed the Cornell research."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_fed_beef


When you provide me with "grass fed" beef that is not the progeny of a cloned animal, then, and only then, will I buy from you again. Every dang pound of beef you sell has come from a feedlot where the animals were fattened on corn and grain. Wise up! Their digestive tracts aren't made for it. When their stomachs and intestines develop lesions from eating corn and grain, the cattle and dairy animals become infected with E.coli. Pumping more antibiotics into the cattle is not the answer because now the E.coli is becoming immune to antibiotics. The manure from corn and grain fed cattle with E.coli is contaminating our ground water. Uninformed and unwary gardeners and produce growers spread contaminated, uncomposted manure on their soil, and now the soil is becoming infected too. The E.coli from contaminated cattle then contaminates the meat processing plants. It's becoming a real food chain nightmare!

It's killing people or making them very, very ill! And the big grocers like you will be pulling E.coli contaminated beef and spinach (etc.) off of your shelves until you wise up! If you miss a single package of recalled products, you already know we consumers are going to sue the pants off of you.

If you want to FIX the problem, demand only grass fed beef from your suppliers!

Furthermore, stop selling "aged" cattle manure in your garden centers. Because of E.coli, today cow manure must be aerobically composted, turned several times, and must reach an internal temperature of at least 140 degrees, or it can contaminate the soil with disease.

Wise Up!

Sincerely,

The only problem with this is...in order for the beef producers to provide us ALL with organic, grass fed beef, it would take a pasture or meadow the size of America to free range the amount of cattle they house for slaughter on a day to day basis. Feedlots allow a high number of cattle to be raised on minimal acreage. The idea is good and I feel your concern as well, but its never or can never happen. The best bet, fully cook your hamburger meat. Make sure the center of the patty reaches the 140 degrees you speak of and you should have no worry. Plus, clean all preperation surfaces after preparing the meat before laying anything else on it. Or, grow your own steers and slaughter them yourself. Then you know whats in it and how its fed and reared. Kinda give you an idea of just how much grass it takes to fatten livestock. 2 years worth of grass per head is a lot of grass. Now figure that on a national scale. There is not enough land in America to supply everybody with grass fed organic beef.

Actually farmhound, there are some new alternatives to pasture out there. Today, you can grass feed your beef without pasture. Check these sites out. If Australia can do it, so can America.

http://www.foddersolutions.org/application.htm

http://www.grazegreen.com/photos.html

http://smallfarms.net/growingfodder.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/stories/s805364.htm



And I've got a feeling if you planted good pasture on all the acreage in America now being planted to corn by subsidy sucking monocroppers, there'd be a lot more room to grass feed beef.

America plants 69.1 MILLION acres to corn annually.

Wow! Writting a letter to your grocery store works! Here's one of the replies I got back...

Dear Ms. xxx:

Thank you for contacting us regarding the beef sold in our stores. We continue
to monitor the issue. Our approach is
based on customer preference. It is our understanding that customers want more
information on this issue. That's
why it is our intention to tell our suppliers that we do not want dairy or meat
products from cloned sources

We appreciate your suggestions and observations about the cattle feed and the
manure sold in our stores.

Thank you again for taking the time to write.

Sincerely,



Patricia Ann Robb
Consumer Affairs

Farmhound, Exactly how many acres of grass is a "year"?

Bill, I've been waiting for Farmhound to respond too. In the meantime, I don't know if there is an easy answer to your question. How many acres planted in grass annually would it take to feed all of America's cattle? Well, is that irrigated pasture or non-irrigated free range? And are you also talking about feeding the animals on the hoof that account for the fact that we also export about three billion pounds of beef annually?

Also, in my research of the subject I've found that most cattlemen say a cow and her calf require about 1.5 acres of good grassland, while a steer requires about an acre, but the figures are vague and don't necessarily tell us how much additional supplemental feeding may be required to meet the nutritional needs of a single animal.

Furthermore, are the animals to be raised on mixed grasses which provide fodder all year long, or are they grazed on high end pasture that typically only grows well in the spring and fall and requires irrigation in the summer or supplemental feeding of cattle in summer and winter? And if it’s the latter, is the pasture to be drill planted annually with winter barley or wheat to give the cattle quality grazing during the winter?

Then there is the question of how well-managed the pastures are. You get a lot more grazing capability when you divide pasture into several paddocks and rotate your stock, leaving some paddocks vacant to allow the grasses to recover from the grazing. You also get more out of pasture when cattle are followed by sheep or goats as well as some kind of poultry. In a mixed grass pasture, all these animals prefer to eat a different thing, so the same acre that might only support one steer, might also additionally support 11 goats and several hundred pastured chickens with no nutritional loss to the cattle.

There is also the fact that grass is a perennial plant that once established will last for many, many years before it needs to be replanted. In contrast, corn and grain are annual crops, each requiring the annual expense of seeding, large, expensive, specialized machinery, and a significant amount of fossil fuels to maintain the crop, not to mention a hefty amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Corn is notorious for its fertilizer and pesticide requirements. In fact, as I recall, corn alone accounts for over one half of all fertilizers and pesticides used in America today.

There is no easy answer to your question. We can only weigh the pros and cons and decide where to go from here. I am reasonably certain that most people here on the Organic Gardening forum would prefer to graze cattle on grass, and radically reduce our dependence on corn. But in order to make that hope a reality no doubt we would have to be extremely vocal about it and we'd have to come nose to nose with one of the most powerful and influential lobbies in Washington D.C.

quote:

There is no easy answer to your question.

Sure there is. Don't eat beef. That's very easy.

And in response to Farmhound's comment that the "best bet" is to raise and kill it yourself, cook your meat to a certain temperature, and sterilize your kitchen...no offense, FH, but my "best bet" is to not bother, and just eat lower on the food chain. Cheaper and healthier, too.

(Steps off soapbox.)

Since I eat very little meat these days, I can certainly appreciate your point of view. However, I doubt seriously if you are going to talk the people in this nation out of their T-bone steaks or hamburgers, so it's a moot point.

quote:

I doubt seriously if you are going to talk the people in this nation out of their T-bone steaks or hamburgers,

Katie, I agree with you on this. I think what will talk them out of it is a massive outbreak of food poisoning. What we see reported on the news about contamination and recall of things like chopped meat is only the tip of the iceberg which gets revealed.

Only a tiny percent of people in this country are going to decide to raise their own meat or eat only organically raised meat.

Of course vegies get poisoned too.

Someday somehow we have got to realize that we're all in this together. The answer is not to take yourself off the grid and raise your own beef and think you're safe.
Nope.
We are all too interconnected for that.
Either we come up with solutions for the planet or we all bite the dust.

ellen

quote:

Only a tiny percent of people in this country are going to decide to raise their own meat or eat only organically raised meat.

I think that is because only a tiny percent of the people can actually afford to. I know I can't afford it, so my only option has been to severely reduce my meat intake.

quote:

Someday somehow we have got to realize that we're all in this together. The answer is not to take yourself off the grid and raise your own beef and think you're safe.

Nope. We are all too interconnected for that.
Either we come up with solutions for the planet or we all bite the dust.

You are a gal after my own heart. It's oh so true and please help to spread the word...

I have not used animal manures
as compost for the last 4 to 5 years;
because of the E. coli and
antibiotics and steroids
being used on the animals by the
animal industry.

Can I neutralize the E. coli
and the antibiotics and steroids
that they use on and for the animals;
by putting the manures into black plastic bags
and solarizing the manures;
so that I can safely use the solarized manures?

=============
Changing the subject.
Going to the cattle processing plant in
Chino, CA; supplying the school kids:
were they processing grass fed cattle?
Were the other grain fed processing plants
trying to get even with this particular
cattle processing plant?

Are the animal industry using a lot
of antibiotics and steroids on the animnals?

Bill, in order to use manure safely, it must be "cooked" to at least 140 degrees first in order to destroy the salmonella and e.coli pathogens. I have never tried solarizing a bag of manure, but it might work. You'd have to be vigilent though and monitor the internal temperature to be safe. I don't honestly know if high temps do anything to get rid of the steroids and antibiotics.

If you try solarizing manure, would you please let us all know how how it goes? If the temp gets up high enough, that sure might be a reasonable solution for people who don't have large enough compost piles to get the heat up.

As to the cows at Chino, the poor things were Holstein Dairy animals. Most dairy cows today are fed commercial feeds that contain the hormones and steriods. The better treated animals get some grazing on grass too, but the dairy cows in factory farm dairy operations are often either penned or in feed lots. I doubt seriously if any other farmers was trying to "get even" in the situation. When cattle go into a slaughterhouse yard, its generally just a mix of all the cows from all their suppliers, so the cows that were being abused could have come from just about anywhere.

What they did to them was sad. And I don't want to eat meat from downed cows because I think its dangerous and doesn't belong in our food supply chain.

Actually, to "solarize" you need to use clear plastic as you want the UV rays getting in as much as the heat. preliminary tests have shown the E. Coli, and such don't take UV well and die off. Same with a lot of antibiotics and steroids (which is why so many of them are stored in tinted containers). If you want to solarize the manure, get some clear 55-gallon drum liners and use them instead of black trashbags.

Bill Griffin, I have a question for you. Let's say an organic gardener goes out and gets a pick-up load of manure. Could he solarize it by laying down some black plastic, spreading the manure on top in a reasonably thin layer, and then cover the whole thing up with a layer of clear plastic? Do you think this would be effective in killing the pathogens in the manure? And if so, how long do you think it would take?