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Guzzling Antibiotics

Here's the history behind the transition from farm to feedlot and why Big
Pharma rules the barn.

by Will Allen, Chelsea Green Publishing

AlterNet (July 06 2009)

We are now living in a post fast-food-awareness reality, riding on the wake
of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser's books (who rode on the wake of
Wendell Berry), films like Food, Inc (2008), renegade farmer heros like Joel
Salatin and Eliot Coleman, and the ever-increasing popularity of urban
gardening and locavores. But awareness, like anything, has its dark side.

Perhaps the hardest thing we post fast-food-aware people face now, is
actually doing something - apart from reading the book and watching the
movie, that is. Because things like slavery were abolished, but racism
persists. And women got the vote, but men still make more money in the
workplace. So maybe "organic" yogurt is now on Wal-Mart's shelves, but that
doesn't mean outdated, inhumane practices like factory farming will not
persist. They'll just call it something else. It's a common thing,
historically - big business trying to blind the masses with our own beacons.

The following is an excerpt from The War on Bugs by Will Allen (2007). It
has been adapted for the Web:-

The small American farms that raised livestock as well as row or orchard
crops and had suffered through depression and war faced even greater
challenges shortly after World War Two. Farmers were buffeted by the costs
of changing both equipment and practices as farms became more chemically
intensive and mechanized. Small farmers struggled in vain to compete with
the further consolidation and expansion of the highly integrated farm
monopolies, such as Continental Grain, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and
Richland Rice and Dunavant Enterprises and J G Boswell in cotton.

In their struggle to survive, many sought to copy the corporate industrial
model of farming and got bigger. Others attempted to sell directly to local
outlets as they always had. But following the war, an urban and suburban
housing expansion took place near many cities that raised the value and the
tax base on millions of acres of farmland. The increased tax base and
increased noise and smell ordinances made it more difficult to farm
conveniently and profitably close to cities. This cut tens of thousands of
growers off from marketing their products directly to consumers.

Then, in the early 1950s, chemical researchers threw another technical
dagger at family farmers. The chemical-pharmaceutical firms introduced a
dramatically new technology that completely transformed the meat, poultry,
and dairy industries - antibiotic farming. This miracle technology allowed
farmers for the first time to confine large numbers of cows, pigs, and
chickens in enclosed areas and still keep them healthy. Advertised as a
revolution in animal management, this breakthrough resulted in no small part
from the discovery that antibiotics, when added in subtherapeutic dosages to
animal feeds, could be used to promote weight gain and prevent diseases.
These management practices set in motion the next great reduction of small
and diversified family farms in the United States by allowing the creation
of huge, intensively managed animal-confinement operations.

In 1949 Dr Thomas Jukes, working for Lederle Laboratories, a division of
American Cyanamid (the first manufacturer of ammonium cyanide in the
Americas), was studying several microorganisms to find which ones could
produce quantities of B-12, a vitamin largely absent from the soybean- and
corn-dominated livestock diet. One microorganism he studied was the
precursor for the antibiotic chlortetracycline, also known as tetracycline.
After extensive experimentation, Jukes accidentally found that feeding small
amounts of this antibiotic to chicks, piglets, and calves caused them to
significantly increase their weight. No one is sure what happened
physiologically, but the use of antibiotics somehow suppressed harmful
bacteria inside the animal's digestive tract, which enhanced growth.

Jukes and the media heavily promoted the immense possibilities of this
discovery, calling it one of the most important developments of the century.
In March 1950, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Jukes's
findings. Word of Jukes's discoveries occupied the attention of the media
for weeks. The New York Daily News even ran a political cartoon that showed
Harry Truman administering a growth-promoting dose of tetracycline to a pig
in an effort to increase pork for Truman's supporters.

The confinement strategy for farm animals that the Jukes discovered came to
dominate US agricultural practices. The photo at right is from the inside of
a "bacon barn" or "hog hotel", as these jails for hogs are variously called.
Notice the girth restraints on the hogs, which further confine them to their
prison cells.

Livestock rancher and journalist Orville Schell studied the meat industry
between 1978 and 1984 for his book, Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones and
the Pharmaceutical Farm (1984). Schell, who was a cattle rancher as well as
an investigative journalist, realized that the use of antibiotics and
hormones could be disastrous to farming, to farm animals, and to people who
ate the meat. He took on issues of antibiotic abuse and endocrine disruption
due to chemical farming practices long before farmers or almost anyone else
in the United States realized the dangers. Schell found that by 1954, six
years after the discovery of tetracycline's effect on animal growth, US
farmers used 490,000 pounds (245 tons) of antibiotic feed additives in
livestock feed.

In 1977, Jukes boasted that the results produced on farms were so
spectacular, especially with pigs, that we could not begin to supply the
demand". By 1960, 1.2 million pounds were used annually. By 1985, it was
nine million pounds. Schell felt that by 1985 it was the exception rather
than the rule to find a farmer who did not use antibiotic feed additives on
his livestock. By 2001 more than nineteen million pounds were being used.

Pharmaceutical corporations claimed that with antibiotics, the stress of the
crowded conditions of confinement could be overcome. Again, the federal
agencies did not challenge these claims. So, the path was paved for today's
industrial bacon bins, chicken factories, and feedlots where pigs, chickens,
and beef cows are raised in cramped conditions and treated with several
chemical additives and drugs to keep them from getting sick in crowded cells
and pens. However, Schell found that within a decade after the large-scale
introduction of antibiotics into feedstocks microbiologists in Japan had
discovered that their extensive use had led to the emergence of bacteria
that were resistant to the antibiotics themselves.

The Japanese scientists called the resistance phenomenon "infectious drug
resistance", which means that subsequent generations of bacteria could
develop resistance to antibiotic drugs, then transfer that property of
resistance to other bacteria as well. Within a few more years, the
overmedication of animals to induce weight gain had effectively begun to
eliminate any of the benefits that antibiotics offered in terms of weight
gain and resistance to disease in crowded pens.

By the 1970s, hundreds of generations of bacteria succeeded in developing
resistance to the drugs being fed to cattle at low dosages but over a long
period of time. As more bacteria became resistant to the same antibiotics
that humans depended on, the continued large-scale use of them in chicken,
beef, pork, and milk cows threatened the elimination of these antibiotics
for human illnesses.

It soon became clear to doctors and researchers that antibiotics had to be
used only as a last resort in order to preserve their capacity for
protecting human health, or they would be lost to medicine. Instead of
heeding the warnings of the doctors and medical scientists, however, the
drug companies convinced farmers to use antibiotics like vitamins or food
supplements. In 1979, Dr Richard Novick of the New York City Public Health
Research Institute told Orville Schell that "the only hope of maintaining
the usefulness of antibiotics is to use them for specific purposes in a
limited and carefully controlled manner, and only against organisms that are
known to be sensitive to them".

American Cyanamid's promotions in The National Hog Farmer pose these
questions:

Ask Yourself: Can I afford to finish my hogs with Aureomycin tetracycline
during a tight year?

Then Ask Yourself: Can I afford slow growth, poor feed efficiency, cervical
abscesses, bacterial enteritis, and the drag of atrophic rhinitis during any
year?

Aureomycin doesn't cost, it pays.

Sadly, the problems that the farmer is forced to treat in this ad are the
results of confinement hog management. The pigs of farmers who use
rotational grazing suffer these ailments either not at all or at least not
at anywhere near the same rates as continuously confined pigs.

(c) 2009 Chelsea Green Publishing All rights reserved.

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