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I think the issue here is not whether to choose cow or soy milk, but to choose the smaller, more local brand as possible. To eat close to home. Huge feed lots are horrible--for the cattle, for the land, and for the people consuming the end product. However, most of the soy produced in the world is not organic and is heavily sprayed--creating another environmental problem. Eating locally will not solve all of this, but it will help you to be more mindful of what your food is.
Huge corporation farms and all the crap they put in processed foods (and how many foods we eat are processed!) are a much, much larger problem than cow vs. soy.
OK, so what habitat is destroyed to feed people a vegetarian diet? Or would be destroyed? Please, if you have anything other than personal opinion on this, could you please cite that? I doubt that a mass conversion to an entirely vegetarian diet is going to happen. Ever.
Or are you talking about destruction of rain forest for soy farming (as the OP said?) If so, I don't know what that has to do with being a vegetarian unless you're assuming vegetarians eat a ton of soy.
I beginning to think you and TexasHorseLady are downright obsessed with vegetarians!
In short, I'm with Crazy4878 on this: buy local. It's not an answer to minimizing the ill effects of industrial milk and soy farming, but it's a darn good start. You will be supporting local farmers and ranchers. And surely, it's a good idea to know what's in your food and where it came from!
SCGranny - Oh no! Now we know the "culprit" is pea soup! How sad - it was my favorite soup, too....
BrokenTap-------if a 60% grass sileage,40% corn sileage supplies all the needed protein you must have some heck of a high protein grass .
I would think the 40% corn sileage would really drag down the protein in your ration cuz corn sileage tests very low in protein.
This is the problem, a lot of people do not realize that a ruminant can only take in so much protein. You can see it in the manure. When a cow has too much protein they simply poo it out in loose stools. I am sure you saw it on your farm...as the cows transitioned in the spring from winter feed to pasture, the protein went up and they started spraying poo instead of coming out in plops. That is excess protein at work.
The corn comes into play because with cows, the last thing they produce is milk. Muscle and even fat are all used before a cow begins lactating. That is why a farmer that starves is cows is not saving money at all, you have to feed your cows to get milk...but why do so and watch the cow poo it out? Hence the reason for the 60% of grass.
With a 40% ration of corn, we are giving the cow energy to convert that grass into milk. We even spent an enormous amount of money on a chopper that has a secondary processor in the head. As the corn comes into the chopper, it is not only chopped into ¼" pieces, it cracks the kernels of corn. Its pretty amazing to see, but those cracked kernels allow the cows to extract even more energy out of the corn we feed. Ultimately it reduces our processed grain bill by vast amounts. In short, we are growing our own grain instead of purchasing the majority of it.
But to answer your question...yes we do have high protein grass. In fact we have changed our entire operation in order to get high protein milk. Nowadays we are paid bonuses on the protein in the milk. That is because butterfat content means very little, while protein is extracted from the milk and sold to sports drink processors like gatorade. A lot of people do not realize this, but sports drinks get their protein from...milk!
In years past we used to plant our corn and then harvest our grass silage. Now we plant our corn until the grass is at optimum levels. Today the grass is prime. So we stop planting corn and grab the grass when it is prime. For the next two weeks we will get our grass crop in, and then finish up our corn. Now we will lose some yield because we will have to use 60 day corn and it will be shorter in height, but what we gain in protein bonuses for our milk more then makes up for it.
This change also allows us to get an additional crop of grass in. Instead of grabbing 2 crops, we get 3. The first crop of grass will generate 11% protein levels. The second crop 14% and the 3rd crop will get us in the 19% range. Since this is grass silage and not hay, we are not losing losses to dry-down, sunlight or storage.
Well, let's put it this way, Broken Tap. Grass fed beef tastes a heck of a lot better, in my opinion, than corn-fed (it has actual flavor, imagine that), it's what the cows are designed to eat, and based on my having to bring my grass-fed cows home sometimes when they go walkabout, and the way they come running when they see me (they've on occasion been known to beat the horses), "lethargic" is not a term that I would use to describe them.
You make it sound as if I am a anti-grass fed only farmer and that is just not true. In fact I raise and sell grass fed only lambs every year. Now I am sure that begs the question, how can one raise grass fed only and feed sheep corn at the same time? Well it is pretty easy.
Lambs are born in the winter and upon birth do not have the rumen capacity to be able to handle corn silage. You could literally stuff a lamb until its full, but it will die of starvation because it takes 3 times as much silage to make up for the same dry matter of hay...that is because 2/3 of silage is water.
As they get older and go on pasture, their nutritional requirements are easily met with growing grass so no additional feed like grain is needed. Since my lambs have a ½ pound per day growth rate, and the ideal weight is determined to be 100 pounds...you get a birth to slaughter time period of 200 days...exactly when the pasture is beginning to die off. That means the lamb was indeed raised grass fed only.
The breeding stock ewes are a different story. Their sole existenace is to make babies so during the cold winter months they need addional calories and feed. I could waste time and money harvesting acres of fields at 4 tons to the acre, or I can harvest corn silage at 23-25 tons to the acre? Why spend extra time and money feeding breeeding stock for something that will most likely never hit a dinner plate? What I am doing is actually matching my feed to the nutritional and marketing conditions that exist and that is my point on this. I feed my livestock based on their nutritonal needs and not on some marketing ploy. Thankfully with my sheep, the time-line works out well that I can do both.
As for energy levels, my sheep on pasture are lazy as compared to when they are being fed corn. This was a notation the livestock experts here in Maine noted when they did a visit last fall. They could not get over how alert and playful the sheep were being.
As for corn not being part of a ruminants natural diet...baloney. Fence in an acre of corn and an acre of grass and see where they graze first. Better yet put a fence up after they have grazed on corn for a few days and see if you can keep them out. It will take a pretty stout fence. Of course they love potatoes and turnips even more!
BT-----I find it very hard to believe you can feed that low in protein of grass sileage, low protein corn sileage, and still get the cows to milk good.
Around here, most farmers want a minimum of 20% protein in their haylage to cut down on their soybean meal bill.
Maybe we are not...but I think what we are doing is striking an ideal balance between input costs and utilizing feed that we have. We could no doubt buy additional supplemental grain, but that would be a huge expense since shipping grains this far east of the corn belt is expensive. We might be able to get more milk but what is the sense if we are spending more money to make that extra milk?
We could get our protein levels up too by growing fields of alfalfa too, but as stated on a different thread, the cost of getting our very acidic soil up to support growing alfalfa would also be cost prohibitive. I think that is why what you call low levels of protein is pretty high for this area.
One other thing to keep in mind is, Maine has the highest per 100 wt pay for dairy farmers in the country right now, so we can have a lower effeciency of scale. Our farm has never made money on sheer volume...it is our quality of the milk (and the bonuses it pays...including the all important high protein level) that is making dairy farming pay off for us. We are not getting rich at this point, breaking even, but it was a lot better then losing 40K a week a few weeks ago.
This is feeling similar to a global warming debate, you know, where scientists around the world have a general consensus that it exists, whereas, part of the public still debates it as if it doesn't. I believe there is a general consensus amongst the scientific community that we have an unsustainable food growing problem and that the raising of meat and especially cattle is a far more inefficient means of growing food than the raising of vegetables, grains, and legumes. I believe environmental destruction is going to happen no matter how you are trying to feed 7 billion people, but to feed 9.5 billion by the year 2050 as the growth rate is predicting, will require a shift to a more vegetarian based diet for the entire world. But in my personal opinion, I don't see that happening, based on the many people who would refuse such a change.You only have to travel to South America, Borneo, India or China to see that we have a serious food problem. If all you see is the cattle grazing on your pretty farm, you're not seeing the problem.
And our nation is becoming filled with men who are clinically sterile, who have drank milk all of their lives.
Little girls who have been growing breasts at 10 years old.
There is way to much estrogen in our nation's diet.
It isn't simply milk (consider what's in some of the store bought milk these days). It's the soy everywhere, the water contaminated with birth control drugs and hormones and so forth...
This is feeling similar to a global warming debate, you know, where scientists around the world have a general consensus that it exists, whereas, part of the public still debates it as if it doesn't. I believe there is a general consensus amongst the scientific community that we have an unsustainable food growing problem and that the raising of meat and especially cattle is a far more inefficient means of growing food than the raising of vegetables, grains, and legumes. I believe environmental destruction is going to happen no matter how you are trying to feed 7 billion people, but to feed 9.5 billion by the year 2050 as the growth rate is predicting, will require a shift to a more vegetarian based diet for the entire world. But in my personal opinion, I don't see that happening, based on the many people who would refuse such a change.You only have to travel to South America, Borneo, India or China to see that we have a serious food problem. If all you see is the cattle grazing on your pretty farm, you're not seeing the problem.
Where are you getting your information? Who are the scientists that you speak of, and who provides their funding?
One thing I've found, as someone who's really into researching, is that I must try to give MORE scrutiny to those sources that seem to support what I want to believe than I even do to those that contradict it, in order to keep myself honest. Do you do that? Or do you choose (or choose to believe) only those sources that support the opinion you already have?
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