Farm Management and Food Quality From the Doctor’s Perspective
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 | By: Arden Andersen, D.O., M.S.P.H., Ph.D
I recently visited New Zealand and taught two 2-day soil and plant nutrition courses and a 1-day human health course. It had been over 4 years since I last visited New Zealand. There were both exciting and disappointing experiences on my visit.
The disappointing experience was that New Zealand seems enthralled with "Americanizing" its agriculture. Their dairy industry, led by Fonterra, is converting to the American feedlot model complete with corn silage, grain, distillers dried grain, palm kernel and high nitrogen forage. The Minister of Agriculture 6 years ago, Jim Anderton, stated that even though over 70% of New Zealander’s were opposed to genetically engineered crops, he and his administration knew better for the public and would see to it that GMO’s entered the country. They have and are being grown in New Zealand and imported in the feed. Urea applications to the pastures are so high that milk urea nitrogen level are 2 to 3 times those of US milk and the Ministry for the Environment published in an article that over half of New Zealand’s lakes and streams were unsafe for swimming.
Milk cow lactation life expectancy is down to 2.5 lactations, mastitis rates approach 50%, infertility is worsening, and cows have the ends of their tails clipped because their diarrhea is seen as "normal" animal health. Oh, and that wonderful New Zealand lamb? Sheep are so undernourished and have such a problem with resistant parasites that they are drenched at least 5 times with a combination drug of derquantel and abomectin, which are excreted largely in the feces and subsequently suppresses beneficial soil microorganisms such as dung beetles and earthworms. Further, a common practice is to inject the ewes with Ovastatin to stimulate ovulation and increase the number of twins born. They will also use Androvax to increase lambing percent. So much for the "clean, green and pristine" image. The point here is not to disparage New Zealand, only the methods of producing "food" that they have decided to employ.
Parasites are indicators of nutritional imbalances in the animals and ovulation and twinning occur naturally in truly healthy, well mineralize animals. Many sheep growers feed liquid urea for the animals which pretty much guarantees compromised immune systems and breeding problems.
Like many of the vets in the US, New Zealand vets make a significant part of their living from the drugs they sell to farmers (Illegal in human medicine, that’s why we have pharmacies). Consequently, vets are not interested, for the most part, in improving pasture health or animal nutrition that would reduce animal ailments as they would lose significant revenue.
On the other side of the coin, I met and renewed acquaintances with farmers all around New Zealand that were doing it well. They were managing calcium driven pasture systems rather than nitrogen driven pasture systems. Many were feeding free choice minerals and kelp. As a result they didn’t have the parasite, mastitis, milk urea nitrogen, breeding and diarrhea problems. The net result - they were also much more profitable than their conventional counterparts.
Peter Floyd, of eCOGENT, has documented over the past five years that as pasture brix increases, so directly does profitably per hectare or acre as is our term. He has documented that as nitrogen (urea) use increases, profit declines. He has documented this on all types of grazing operations including dairy, beef, sheep and deer.
It is gratifying to see more folks becoming engaged in organic or sustainable food production and concentrating on the real point of animal farming --- feeding people. People need healthy, highly mineralized animals so that the edible animal products provide the nutrition necessary for humans to be healthy. It is that plain and simple.
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