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Your family’s beef production is not representative of either the modern American beef industry where only a few percentage of cattle are grass fed and where 40% of national corn production is used for livestock feed (I couldn’t find the % just for beef), nor of global beef ranching where large swaths of forest are burned to expose land for grazing. There’s plenty of material on the subject if you want to read it.
This has to do with heart attacks, strokes, and other food-related diseases. Not the efficient use of farmland. Esp when people go into a convenience store and just about everything in there is harmful for them to consume. God is going to hold us accountable for the harm we do to others.
Over time you realize you are not getting the nutrition from them that you get from other foods. So it becomes a catch-22. We have to balance the benefit against the risk and ask ourselves do we really need to be eating this and what is the benefit of what I am doing.
I've driven all over the state of Texas; and all that I have seen is cows in open fields, eating grass.
According to the research that Dr Ornish has done, diet and exercise are the keys to good health. Even people; can recover from an otherwise fatal disease if they start to eat right.
That could very well depends on where you drive in Texas. You may find this interesting:
I've driven all over Texas. I've crossed its' borders North, South, East, and West. I saw cows, freely roaming the fields, eating grass, mostly to the North, South and East; but I've seen plenty of signs, left behind by grazing cows, in the Desert West. I picked up one once, thinking that it was a dried out cactus; but when I broke it in half, and saw remnants of blades of dried out grass inside; I realized what I was holding.
That reminded me of something I saw once during a drought. I think it was in west Texas where farmers were burning the spines off prickly pear for cattle to eat (this was early 1970s).
I don't think you have totally understood the way most beef cattle are raised. Yes, most of the beef that we eat comes from feed lots that put the cattle on grain feed in an intensive feed out process to create fast weight gain and fat gain. However, this process is expensive and they try to minimize the amount of time until the meat is processed. Most of the calves are birthed and raised in pasture based cow-calf operations for nearly a year before selling them to the feedlots. These feedlots do not typically own cows for breeding and are not willing to wait the 10 months until the cow gives birth. They are also not conducive for raising small calves as the packed and unsanitary conditions would cause health issues. So it is normal for most cattle to spend more time eating and growing in a pasture than a feedlot. This does not excuse the problems caused by the feedlots. It just tries to put this process into context.
Two daughters of my late wife's friend attended a cookout. They both claimed to be vegetarians, making salads while the rest of us ate hamburgers. On their salads they sprinkled Bac-O's (imitation bacon bits). I asked them the same thing-why would you put imitation meat in your salad if you are anti-meat?
