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<blockquote data-quote="IGotMyWings" data-source="post: 741313" data-attributes="member: 8639"><p>Now we're talking! Discussion that doesn't start with nuh-uh! </p><p></p><p>I understand that certain modifications have been God sends, like the insect resistance in cotton. And as hypocritical as it may be, I can live with that (see, I'm not really a tree hugger), but I'm not eating my cotton sheets.</p><p></p><p>I have no proof that transgenic feeds in livestock or transgenic food for humans is bad, but it is, by definition, not natural, and as a natural food producer, I am concerned. Like I said, even if I personally thought GMO was the perfect solution to everything from world hunger to bucked teeth, because I choose to raise my cattle on natural feed sources, I would have to be against it because a) if it's "so" natural, why <strong>can't</strong> I feed it (if certified organic), and b) if it takes the market by storm like RR corn or beans, then my feed supply is in real danger of contamination. I, honestly, don't understand why we need RR forage crops, anyway. Maybe I live in a bubble, but my hay ground and the hay ground of my neighbor where I buy my hay seems to be pretty weed free without any treatment at all. </p><p></p><p>When it comes to health benefits of organic over mass produced, I don't know that it's the vitamin content and such that is the selling point so much that being certified organic means that every step of the process is tightly monitored. The dirt, the crop, and the processing facility, have all been voluntarily set to a higher standard, and no chemical additives are part of the process. Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farm is a good example of why people choose organic. He butchers chickens outside. When someone said thou shalt not because outside is dirty and contaminated, they challenged the logic, took his chicken and a store bought chicken to a university lab and each was tested for contaminants. Oddly enough, the one processed inside the "clean" factory environment was much more "contaminated" than the one processed outside. I don't eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I guess that is one reason I don't get to be in the tree hugger club...too much of a carnivore. Anyway, my mother, father-in-law, wife and others in my circle that love tomatoes eat them seemingly, by the ton in the summer, but don't buy them in the winter. Why? Because fresh tomatoes (not organic or whatever, just fresh) taste better than store bought. Isn't store bought fresh? It's red! It's firm! It's picked green and gassed until it turns red, so to their taste buds, there is a difference in a REAL fresh tomato and a real tomato that's freshness is faked, for lack of a better term.</p><p></p><p>What makes natural better? When you start making food out of fake ingredients, you take away from the nutritional value. Our bodies are designed to process sugar. Sugar that naturally occurs in oranges and apples, etc. Our bodies, studies have shown, have difficulty with high fructose corn syrup, or more accurately, corn syrup has been shown to block certain receptors that tell us when to stop eating. The label may indicate that the calories, vitamins and all that are similar if not equal, but that's not the whole of nutritional value. </p><p></p><p>As for steroids, yes, the human body produces them. What the human body doesn't do, when in perfect working order, is over create them. It goes back to the previous paragraph. Our bodies know what to do with natural amounts of real sugar, and they know what to do with natural amounts of hormones. The body reacts to over abundance and adapts. With sugar, it makes and stores fat. With hormones, it takes them and does the same thing that they were fed to the cattle for...makes the body mature/grow faster. <a href="http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/hormones/" target="_blank">http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/hormones/</a></p><p></p><p>My link from transgenics to processing was more of a step by step; first, we start with tinkering with the food our food eats, and end with spraying the food with window cleaner to make it better? sort of thing. Each step of the process takes our product farther from what nature intended. I said before that the biggest part of the problem isn't what WE do as the producer, but what is done to our product after it leaves our care. It's a slope and what lies at the bottom of the slope is scary to me. As seen by some of the previous arguments against what I brought up, the thought process was simply to tell me that I'm making stuff up, and that transgenics are just as natural as natural. My information is just as susceptible to flaw as anyone else's but just like any other topic, there are different ways to look at it, and that's all I really wanted to show! There is a large number of people that blindly follow whatever someone tells them. Large companies are out for a buck. In order to have you help them make that buck, they will tell you that what they do is right, just, and perfectly safe. Ten years later, we find that they were greedy, and we got suckered. I researched grass feeding, I researched steroid use, and I decided that I liked the benefits of feeding grass and that steroids, to me, weren't a good idea. I don't know that GMO is a culprit or agricultural messiah. What I do know, again, is that transgenic or GMO feed is prohibited in a natural/organic meat operation. IF it is so pure and just as natural, then why can't I use it and have it considered a natural feed source? That's where my distrust comes from. Monsanto says it's better than nature, the USDA says it's not (as a feed source).</p><p></p><p>I would like to see agribusiness be run by agricultural business men. I would like to see the farmer have more control of his destiny. I would like to see people not having to worry about eating the food that we take pride in producing. When IBP or whoever has to recall 40,000 pounds of E.Coli contaminated meat, who looks bad? IBP? Nope. The cattle farmer does. The media asks questions about beef being safe, not beef from IBP. Oprah tells her audience that it makes her think twice about eating a hamburger! The meat, in and of itself, is safe. It's some chemical company/chemical additive or lackey on an assembly line that taints it, but we, the cattle farmers, take the hit.</p><p></p><p>The treating of a sick animal is the biggest reason I will never certify as organic. My operation is very small, and having to cull an animal that got a shot for a snotty nose would be a fair percentage of my "crop" and I can't afford to take that hit. Antibiotics may seem to go against my natural slant, but they have been around long enough that I don't have to rely on the chemical company's statement to know that they are safe to use as a therapeutic response. As antibiotic residue is not only a concern of mine, but of my customers, I promise to exceed the WD time by double the label before I offer that animal for sale. Over the past two years, I've given one shot. </p><p></p><p>I also took a hit because I said that many of my customers are educated. What I meant by that was not to claim that education is better than experience, and that one has to have a degree to be smart. What I was trying to say was that the people who have come to me about grass fed beef are thinking people, who have thought about their food choices, and are making decisions based on what they have learned. Based on what they learned, and the changes in their diets to natural food (like raw milk), they say that they feel better. Am I supposed to tell them that they just think they fell better when they eat natural food?</p><p></p><p>My comments about taste was not so much grass fed verses grain fed. It was about natural ingredients making the final product taste better. Like you, I like real butter, because it tastes better. You want corn fed beef? Fine. I am not trying to say my beef tastes better than yours. Tastes are subjective. I don't like the taste of coffee, so I don't drink it. I'm not saying that corn is the evil, I'm offering the possibility that what is mixed with the corn may taint the flavor of the steak. I'm offering the possibility that what is mixed with the corn may alter the nutritional value (again, not so much the vitamin content, etc., but how the consumer's body uses or absorbs the nutrients) of the meat.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="IGotMyWings, post: 741313, member: 8639"] Now we're talking! Discussion that doesn't start with nuh-uh! I understand that certain modifications have been God sends, like the insect resistance in cotton. And as hypocritical as it may be, I can live with that (see, I'm not really a tree hugger), but I'm not eating my cotton sheets. I have no proof that transgenic feeds in livestock or transgenic food for humans is bad, but it is, by definition, not natural, and as a natural food producer, I am concerned. Like I said, even if I personally thought GMO was the perfect solution to everything from world hunger to bucked teeth, because I choose to raise my cattle on natural feed sources, I would have to be against it because a) if it's "so" natural, why [b]can't[/b] I feed it (if certified organic), and b) if it takes the market by storm like RR corn or beans, then my feed supply is in real danger of contamination. I, honestly, don't understand why we need RR forage crops, anyway. Maybe I live in a bubble, but my hay ground and the hay ground of my neighbor where I buy my hay seems to be pretty weed free without any treatment at all. When it comes to health benefits of organic over mass produced, I don't know that it's the vitamin content and such that is the selling point so much that being certified organic means that every step of the process is tightly monitored. The dirt, the crop, and the processing facility, have all been voluntarily set to a higher standard, and no chemical additives are part of the process. Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farm is a good example of why people choose organic. He butchers chickens outside. When someone said thou shalt not because outside is dirty and contaminated, they challenged the logic, took his chicken and a store bought chicken to a university lab and each was tested for contaminants. Oddly enough, the one processed inside the "clean" factory environment was much more "contaminated" than the one processed outside. I don't eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I guess that is one reason I don't get to be in the tree hugger club...too much of a carnivore. Anyway, my mother, father-in-law, wife and others in my circle that love tomatoes eat them seemingly, by the ton in the summer, but don't buy them in the winter. Why? Because fresh tomatoes (not organic or whatever, just fresh) taste better than store bought. Isn't store bought fresh? It's red! It's firm! It's picked green and gassed until it turns red, so to their taste buds, there is a difference in a REAL fresh tomato and a real tomato that's freshness is faked, for lack of a better term. What makes natural better? When you start making food out of fake ingredients, you take away from the nutritional value. Our bodies are designed to process sugar. Sugar that naturally occurs in oranges and apples, etc. Our bodies, studies have shown, have difficulty with high fructose corn syrup, or more accurately, corn syrup has been shown to block certain receptors that tell us when to stop eating. The label may indicate that the calories, vitamins and all that are similar if not equal, but that's not the whole of nutritional value. As for steroids, yes, the human body produces them. What the human body doesn't do, when in perfect working order, is over create them. It goes back to the previous paragraph. Our bodies know what to do with natural amounts of real sugar, and they know what to do with natural amounts of hormones. The body reacts to over abundance and adapts. With sugar, it makes and stores fat. With hormones, it takes them and does the same thing that they were fed to the cattle for...makes the body mature/grow faster. [url]http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/hormones/[/url] My link from transgenics to processing was more of a step by step; first, we start with tinkering with the food our food eats, and end with spraying the food with window cleaner to make it better? sort of thing. Each step of the process takes our product farther from what nature intended. I said before that the biggest part of the problem isn't what WE do as the producer, but what is done to our product after it leaves our care. It's a slope and what lies at the bottom of the slope is scary to me. As seen by some of the previous arguments against what I brought up, the thought process was simply to tell me that I'm making stuff up, and that transgenics are just as natural as natural. My information is just as susceptible to flaw as anyone else's but just like any other topic, there are different ways to look at it, and that's all I really wanted to show! There is a large number of people that blindly follow whatever someone tells them. Large companies are out for a buck. In order to have you help them make that buck, they will tell you that what they do is right, just, and perfectly safe. Ten years later, we find that they were greedy, and we got suckered. I researched grass feeding, I researched steroid use, and I decided that I liked the benefits of feeding grass and that steroids, to me, weren't a good idea. I don't know that GMO is a culprit or agricultural messiah. What I do know, again, is that transgenic or GMO feed is prohibited in a natural/organic meat operation. IF it is so pure and just as natural, then why can't I use it and have it considered a natural feed source? That's where my distrust comes from. Monsanto says it's better than nature, the USDA says it's not (as a feed source). I would like to see agribusiness be run by agricultural business men. I would like to see the farmer have more control of his destiny. I would like to see people not having to worry about eating the food that we take pride in producing. When IBP or whoever has to recall 40,000 pounds of E.Coli contaminated meat, who looks bad? IBP? Nope. The cattle farmer does. The media asks questions about beef being safe, not beef from IBP. Oprah tells her audience that it makes her think twice about eating a hamburger! The meat, in and of itself, is safe. It's some chemical company/chemical additive or lackey on an assembly line that taints it, but we, the cattle farmers, take the hit. The treating of a sick animal is the biggest reason I will never certify as organic. My operation is very small, and having to cull an animal that got a shot for a snotty nose would be a fair percentage of my "crop" and I can't afford to take that hit. Antibiotics may seem to go against my natural slant, but they have been around long enough that I don't have to rely on the chemical company's statement to know that they are safe to use as a therapeutic response. As antibiotic residue is not only a concern of mine, but of my customers, I promise to exceed the WD time by double the label before I offer that animal for sale. Over the past two years, I've given one shot. I also took a hit because I said that many of my customers are educated. What I meant by that was not to claim that education is better than experience, and that one has to have a degree to be smart. What I was trying to say was that the people who have come to me about grass fed beef are thinking people, who have thought about their food choices, and are making decisions based on what they have learned. Based on what they learned, and the changes in their diets to natural food (like raw milk), they say that they feel better. Am I supposed to tell them that they just think they fell better when they eat natural food? My comments about taste was not so much grass fed verses grain fed. It was about natural ingredients making the final product taste better. Like you, I like real butter, because it tastes better. You want corn fed beef? Fine. I am not trying to say my beef tastes better than yours. Tastes are subjective. I don't like the taste of coffee, so I don't drink it. I'm not saying that corn is the evil, I'm offering the possibility that what is mixed with the corn may taint the flavor of the steak. I'm offering the possibility that what is mixed with the corn may alter the nutritional value (again, not so much the vitamin content, etc., but how the consumer's body uses or absorbs the nutrients) of the meat. [/QUOTE]
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