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What are your cows eating? Cookies, ice cream, and more...
The Midwest drought has withered the nation's corn crop and pushed up corn prices -- sending livestock farmers in search of alternatives to feed their cattle. But as the market for alternative feed rations escalates, dairy producers and feed lot brokers are searching for cheaper options.
Some brokers have gathered up discarded food products and sold them to the highest bidder. Some of the sugary sweet foods your cows are digesting on? Cookies and gummy worms for starters. And there are a whole lot of other foods you might be surprised to learn cows consume. Check out a list below:
- Distillers grains, a byproduct from ethanol manufacturing.
- Cottonseed hulls
- Soy hulls
- Corn stalks
- Rice products
- French fries
- Peanut pellet
- Wheat middlings (a byproduct of milling wheat for flour)
- Cookies
- Gummy worms
- Marshmallows
- Fruit Loops
- Orange peels
- Dried cranberries
- Cereal
- Chocolate
- Ice cream
- Ice cream sprinkles
- Turnips
- Sugar beet by-products
Take a listen to reporter Sarah Gardner's story on the surprising food items farmers are feeding their cattle.
Ruminants are supposed to eat GRASS, not gummy worms or shredded cardboard. What a terribly done story. I listened in disbelief, like it was a production of The Onion or something. Feeding cattle corn has wreaked havoc on Americans. Cancer and heart disease abound from eating factory farmed and feedlot raised meat and dairy. Even Mexico doesn't want eggs from the united states because grain feeding chickens completely changes the egg. Omega 6s and 3s are out of proper proportion and this leads to high cholesterol. This story was awful and didn't even address the consequences of feeding cheap garbage calories to the animals we eat in this country. LAME. Yet another nail in the coffin of the American diet. The news keeps getting worse!
While the list is an atrocious list of junk food, it is important to remember that bovines are ruminants and that biologically, ruminants convert carbohydrates into protein. A protein rich diet is poisonous to ruminants. So while all this junk food seems terrible, cattle have successfully thrived on diets of shredded cardboard.
