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Distillers grains and cattle.

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  • Distillers grains and cattle.

    (automatically updated/inserted from The Big Biofuels Blog)


    OK this is slightly off beam, but a lot of people are very keen of feeding distillers grains to cattle. For some ethanol plants it is the most profitable part of the business.

    Animal husbandry is not an area that I know much, if anything about. At home we struggle to keep goldfish alive above three months. (Each one a tragedy.)

    But I came across a good, if long piece of writing to the next Farmer In Chief in the New York Times Magazine the other day. I've been wondering what to do with it, and I guess it was Ensus' new website that prompted me to look at the effects of feeding protein and phosphorus-rich food to heifers. I am not trying to take a pop at Ensus, they're just the most recent example of this thinking that I've come across.

    It turns out that there is no advantage or disadvantage to feeding distillers grains to dairy heifers. According this on eXtension
    The primary advantage in feeding distillers grains to dairy heifers iscost. There are no known biological or nutritional advantages ordisadvantages associatedwith feeding distillers grains to dairy heifers. Research trials inwhich distillers grains were fed to heifers observed normal growthrates, normal reproduction, and normal subsequent milk production.
    For me one of there is a lot of resonance in Michael Pollan's article, especially the part about flying over a brown land, which much of the US is for much of the time (based on series of flights at different seasons to random times across the US in the past 10 years). I am also impressed with his quote:
    As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and putthem on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishingthe fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into twoproblems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem onthe feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuelfertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.
    I don't think of my self as particularly a champion of the organic food movement. Cheap food has enabled many in the west to avoid malnutrition, partly through fertiliser use. Organic food is often the preserve of the wealthy, beacuse it has not been possible to produce it on the scale of industrial food.

    Maybe we need a middle way between these extremes with smaller farms closer to centres of population and inorganic fertiliser application used to suppliement rather than replace fertilisation using animal waste. At least part of this Polland recomends.

    Would benefit farmers to grow a range of crops across their farms rather than being reliant on monocultures of individual crops, if only to spread the risk.

    Enough of this, I'm heading right back onto the beam.




    More (from The Big Biofuels Blog)...

  • #2
    Re: Distillers grains and cattle.

    Although I really like this kind of thinking, there are some practical issues. Farms are located where they are for a reason. Closer to the city, the land is more expensive, and it becomes less viable to do extensive farming, the closer you get to the city. That is why we have intensive farming close to the city (things like market gardens etc), because they provide a larger return per hectare. Things like dairy farms have to make a compromise. They need to be close enough to the city to enable their product to get to it's market, but far enough away so that land isn't too expensive. They also need to be located in a region with the right climate (moreso than beef cattle IIRC).

    So it's not always quite as simple as the elegant solutions suggest, but sometimes the barriers aren't always practicality ones. I know of a few farmers who are pretty keen to try new things, but it's a big risk to outlay a lot of cash to adopt something that hasn't been proven successful (and profitable).

    It would be interesting to see the result of more people owning their own small vege gardens (you see thousands of small vege patches lining the train routes in Germany.)
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