I am super picky about allowing garbage to fall on the ground on our farm. For one, my husband and I just both like a presentable-looking place. But more importantly, trash is really dangerous for ruminants. Just a tiny little sharp-cornered plastic label off the end of a two-by-four, like in the picture above, is something that can wreak havoc in a ruminant’s digestive system.
Cows are most well-known for getting “hardware disease,” but sheep and goats can get it too. It is caused by ingesting non-digestible trash. The most common things ruminants accidentally ingest are bits of wire, staples, nails, plastic bags, and baling twine. These are all things we have around farms, and things which can often end up either in grass fields or in feed troughs. Cows, sheep and goats tend to gorge big mouthfuls of food when they are eating something delicious, like a fresh patch of grass or newly offered hay or grain. So it’s easy for them to take in a foreign object and not notice.
We humans, and our canine friends, are fairly tolerant of accidentally consuming an indigestible object. We are omnivores, and our digestive systems have a better way of passing such objects, usually without catastrophic damage. Almost everyone has a funny family story about something their kid, or dog, has eaten, and later pooped! (At this point, my mom and dad will be chuckling, hehe; because when I was about six, I swallowed a rock and indeed there is an oft-told story there, of which parent got the verification job of making sure I eliminated it!)
A friend of mine once found one of those tennis-ball-sized pink rubber dog toys with a rubber loop attached- in his dog’s poop! So for whatever reason, humans and dogs have an amazing ability to just pass things straight on through.
But ruminants are different. Here is my basic understanding of why it matters in the case of hardware disease. When you check out a diagram of their four-chambered stomach (this one is from Susan Schoenian’s Sheep 101 page), you may spot the problem:
The opening between the omasum and abomasum is very small by design. It’s job is to contract and push large food particles back into the earlier compartments, to be subject to further digestive forces to break them down. So a plastic grocery bag lumped in with a big mouthful of hay goes into the rumen easily enough, tosses around in there, passes through the reticulum and into the omasum. And often there it stays, forever. Ruminant stomachs are a little like front-loader washing machines, their muscle action constantly rotates the contents within to aid digestion. So any kind of foreign object will just roll around in there, continually irritating the lining of the stomach. This can cause anything from mild ill thrift and discomfort, to death.
Twice I have seen such stomach objects personally. A friend of mine had a purchased, mature cow butchered; and the butcher handed him back the oddest looking rope twist that came out of her stomach. It was about as thick and long as my arm, and hard to even tell what it was made from. But the best guess would be many, many strands of plastic baling twine. The incredible tight twist showed how the stomach had turned this melded object hundreds, thousands, or millions of times over that cow’s lifetime. And this big lunk of a thing had been taking up room in her rumen for many years, clunking around in there and surely causing inflammation. I can’t remember why my friend had culled that cow, but perhaps her lack of performance was related to this handicap.
The second time I saw it was at WSU’s Sheep 101 class. We dissected a sheep’s digestive tract, and inside it found a white plastic bag, also twisted and shredded. This sheep had severe damage to the lining of her stomach chambers- we could scrape off all the papillae with the brush of a finger. So either she had acidosis from over-feeding grain, or this plastic bag had done a lot of damage in there, or both. The veterinarian instructor declared that the sheep’s owner was lucky to have butchered her that day, as she would have died soon otherwise. I remembered when we were going over the live animal, that this sheep showed abdominal tenderness. She flinched every time someone put their hands on her belly, and she stood a little hunched. So she was definitely suffering from the consequences of some poor care choices by her FFA youngster owner.
Some people feed cows a magnet bolus, so that at least any metal objects swallowed will stick to that and have some hope of being weighted down to the bottom of the omasum an minimizing movement and irritation. But of course prevention is the best cure in the case of hardware disease. So I try to be meticulous about picking up dropped trash, accounting for every nail and staple in a fencing project, and always picking up and disposing of both strings when opening a new bale of hay. And when purchasing sheep from someone, I feel it’s always good to have a look around at the farm; taking note of whether the proprietor is sloppy about leaving trash around, or keeps a neat and tidy place. Otherwise, you may never know what a poor ruminant has eaten, and is harboring in her stomach, potentially curtailing her productivity for a lifetime.
September 2, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Very interesting! I hadn’t thought about that aspect of farming. I have a question for you–are your cows grass-fed in pastures? I read today that most American beef cattle are fed grain that has lots of chemicals and antibiotics in it. My cousins in England who have farms keep their cattle out in the fields most of the year so they’re mostly grass-fed and so are able to avoid all the yucky stuff in the feed which can do unfortunate things to the bodies of people who eat the cattle (make them more resistant to antibiotics; start puberty early). Thanks for blogging–I enjoy your posts! All best, Ginnie
September 3, 2012 at 12:17 am
Ginnie, we only have sheep thus far, no cows yet. We do grassfeed 8 months out of the year, and offer grass hay the other 4 months. And we supplement with “dry” grain (just plain old corn-oats-barley with no molasses) to “flush” the ewes (get them to a higher ovulation rate through increasing their ration just prior to breeding). They need grain again in the last 4-10 weeks of pregnancy, because with twins and triplets consuming a lot of room in the abdomen, ewes can’t take in enough forage in the last stage of pregnancy and would lose weight without the higher calorie intake. And this year, we let our lambs have access to the same grain in their first 120 days of growth to help them gain (tho it didn’t seem to make much difference, except in the bottle lambs).
I suspect the media has gotten a little carried away with portraying “most” American beef. There is some percentage that’s feedlotted, and fed higher amounts of grain than a grass-based system would choose or need to use. Antibiotics are pretty expensive, I honestly can’t imagine using them full time as a preventive, but perhaps those huge operations use more than what most of us would consider ok. But I think the majority of US beef is still raised the old fashioned way, on grass most of their growing life, and possibly finished with plain grain in the tail end to increase marbling (because Americans love their marbled steak…).
I use antibiotics in a targeted way when a single animal is obviously sick and has a high fever, I think it would be cruel not to treat. I have a lot of concerns over the organic movement, because it creates financial motivation for farmers to avoid treating sick animals and let them suffer (even though it is prohibited to do this). When you have 100+ animals, even if only 3% of them get sick in given year, that’s still 3 animals that might get a virus or bacterial infection bad enough to need some medicinal help to weather through it (just like people, really). The withdrawal time on most of the antibiotics we use is about 2 weeks, so if a lamb was treated for 3 days when he’s two weeks old, and not butchered until 6 months of age, I personally have no concerns that there would be any residue in the tissues after all that time.
September 3, 2012 at 8:15 am
Wow, i had no idea..still so much for me to learn. And just so you know~i’m tickled pink to have found your blog ; )) I’ll be back for more.
September 3, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Thanks Julie!
September 3, 2012 at 8:26 pm
In reference to Virginia’s question above, I just read this today,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-food-defies-scrutiny.html When trying to find chick feed, or any type of show animal feed in this area, it is impossible to get without added antibiotic. There is far more antibiotic being fed than what we know, I have a family members who raise commercial chicken and hogs, it would blow your mind to know just what is fed in many big operations.
September 4, 2012 at 12:16 am
Vickie, I imagine it may be different in different parts of the country. I live in the Northwest, and the culture here is definitely left-leaning. So most consumers push demand in the “natural” direction, which pulls producers and suppliers in that direction as well. Feed stores near me do carry some medicated feed, but I would say if I just ask for “chicken feed”- by default, they would give me the non-medicated kind, unless I specifically asked for the medicated. And I would say the majority of the feeds available here are non-medicated, stores maybe just carry one type of medicated variety for each species, available for those who want them. In contrast, the new fad here is no-corn, no-soy, non-GMO + organic feeds, they taking the world by storm at local feed stores in our region, even though they are nearly double the price of standard feed.
I think as the NYT article points out, we just don’t really know yet how much drugs are being used- we lack concrete data to be certain. There is strong suggestion that some operations are likely overdoing it, but it’s hard to know how prevalent it is. I do know that the USDA has a lot of concerns over antibiotic resistance, and they do surveillance on animals at slaughter plants, and go after producers who have animals turn up with residues. I’m not exposed to it firsthand since I only sell direct market, but I see reports about it in newsletters and such from the USDA, state vet office etc. The unfortunate thing is that if there are some bad apples, the media ends up painting the whole industry with the same brush. So then we hear these allegations that the entire country is pumping 100% of its agricultural animals full of drugs and chemicals all the time, and that’s not really fair. I can’t be the only one who isn’t?
I can say that the challenge of being a producer, especially with sheep, is sometimes an animal is very sick and you don’t know what’s wrong, and the vet doesn’t know either. Rather than risk having the animal die, it is tempting to “give it all you got” and just use every drug you can think of that might help. Consumers may have more trouble connecting with the reality of the distress of having a dying animal on your hands; though I know plenty of people who march into the doctor’s office every time they have a sniffle and demand antibiotics… 🙂 And many doctors are quick to cave in and hand them out. It’s a tough call, withholding medication from a patient who may really need it, all for the greater good.
September 5, 2012 at 3:27 am
Wow, I envy you! If I went into a local feed store and asked for non GMO or organic they would shoot me for being a hippie, just kidding, sort of.
I hope no one has a problem with medicating a sick animal, but there are many huge producers who feed low level antibiotic for the growth enhancing qualities.
I would never let a sick animal suffer for lack of antibiotic or anything else, but I travel to get feed without antibiotic added and ruminant free. Prophylactic antibiotic is a feedlot standard (firsthand experience for this one) and for large poultry operations(my cousin raises for one of the “biggies”).
My uncle was one of a team of scientists at a lab in Oak Ridge, TN, in the 1970s, who were designing new beef cattle feeds. The stories he came home with were disgusting, feeding cattle newspaper, dirt, other cows, sheep, anything to get them to gain fast in a cheap way. I’ll keep the worst stories to myself.
I have had access to knowledge that I often wish I hadn’t, it was incredibly hard for me to grow up where and when I did, thinking like I did. (I wonder if my uncle even knew I was listening to those stories he told my mom and grandparents).
My great aunt Ruby and her family had one of the largest hog farms on the West coast(Oregon) at the time, she minced no words describing their methods either.
You are a leader in a new way of farming, you may not realize it or relish it, but you one of the ground breakers in a new way of thinking about food. I hope to see smaller operations like yours start to command more of the market, but that will only happen if people get wise about how the food is fed and cared for.
Until then, I am raising as much of my own as I can. I know what they ate, how they were treated and that they had a good, though short, life.
September 7, 2012 at 3:30 pm
Vickie, I think consumer demand is the root of all these swings in the industry- first, the demand for the cheapest food possible “encouraged” many producers to find these ridiculous ways to feed and house animals to make them inexpensive. But now I fear the pendulum may be swinging in the other direction, as the consumer naively demands organic meat and is willing to pay top dollar for it, then many producers say, “ok, we heard you, we will not treat sick animals or use drugs ever!” This is almost worst than the first option. :-[
I do worry, because I have heard more than one veterinarian up here complaining about the cruelties (in their eyes) that they see on some organic farms, where very treatable disease (worms, vaccinate-able things, simple infection or pneumonia) goes untreated and animals suffer and die. And I have consumers ask me all the time, trying to confirm, “you *never* use any antibiotics or drugs, do you?” It’s hard to not let my annoyed tone come through as I try to patiently explain why I think that is a poor choice for animal welfare, even if it may be most ideal for the selective human eater.
There has to be some balance, and consumers have to be very careful on what they demand, because industry takes it literally. And it’s hard for consumers to demand the right things, since they don’t know much about farming other than tidbits they read in the news.
It’s a tough conundrum, but I agree with you, that’s why we try to grow more of our own food as well, so we can decide what’s in it and how it’s cared for. Not everyone has that luxury, unfortunately.
September 7, 2012 at 11:38 pm
100% agreement, organic is for plants, humane is for animals. I can’t imagine letting an animal stay sick for lack of antibiotic. And yes, the poor consumer sure has a lot to plow through in the quest for decent food.