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Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

It is oddly cruel to see that logic applied in organic meats. An animal might become infected. It might die a very painful and slow death. But to keep organic certification, not antibiotic maybe used on the farm.

Even for animal that will become food, I would think that kindness should be applied. If it is sick/infected, but still useful for meat, cure it and eat it. If not, just kill it. Don't let it suffer.

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Organic farmers have approved antibiotics they can use (as well as natural remedies). If a dairy cow is treated with antibiotics the holding time before she is allowed back into the milking process is usually double or triple the normal holding time for a non-organic cow (10-15 days vs 5 days). Sh is still milked but the milk is poured away.

Isn't there something more useful they could do with that milk than pour it away?

Possibly composted. That's about it.

Bacteria is needed for composting to happen. Milk with antibiotics in it would hurt that process.

If you're in a professional ag setting (farm, etc), that small amount of milk (and even smaller amount of antibiotics in said milk) should pale in comparison to the amount of material in your compost setup. Should be fine, although I'm willing to test this theory out.

Disclaimer: I'm not a farmer, but I do manage the IT/automation of my/a family farm.

This seems like exactly the kind of "slowly and steadily select for antibiotic resistance in bacteria" behavior that they're trying to avoid with these changes.

Maybe

But below a certain concentration some antibiotics won't have an effect hence, no evolutionary pressure

If at the concentration presented it kills/affects some bacteria, yes, what you mention happens, otherwise it doesn't.

Of course, I may be wrong

It would have to be a non-food application, if we are trying to isolate the antibiotics. The only non-food application of milk that I am aware of is casein plastics.

And casein paint. Non-toxic, solvent free; used in 'traditional' building, along with other wonderful materials like lime plaster and wattle and daub.

When I was young we'd always spray the kittens with it. (I grew up on a dairy farm, fortunately we got rid of the cows when I was about 7)

They loved the whole situation.

Why fortunately?

If mitchty is like all the former dairy farmers I know, it's because dairy farming is a lot of hard work, and it never ends. There are no weekends, and no holidays. I like raising beef cattle because many days you don't even have to look at them. (Not today though! Ice to break on the pond, for starters...)

I can agree with this 100% - much of my family out in Iowa raises dairy. They never get a vacation. Ever.

In regards to the announcement, without teeth, this won't cause any changes. External enforcement is absolutely necessary to make this stick.

Yep, you're both 100% right. Dairy cattle are basically a prison sentence.

We had regular cattle too, those amounted to looking at the pasture they're in and moving them around. Way less upkeep.

Don't break it, skate on it.

Generally a bad idea when the cows need the pond to drink.

Haha yeah we try to use different ponds for those two purposes. Actually when possible I prefer to keep cattle out of ponds entirely for environmental reasons, but faucets freeze too. I have a feeling that by the time this winter starts, I'll be hoping for some global warming.

What kind of beef cattle do you raise? I'm trying to track down heritage breeds but having some trouble. If you have any leads please contact me through the email address in my profile.

Red Angus, with some commercial cattle as ET recips. I don't know anything about "heritage" breeds. I'd recommend Red Angus for all but the very hottest parts of the USA (and other nations at similar latitudes): they tolerate heat better than Black Angus but after all most of the genetics did come from Scotland! They are very docile, and the breed organization emphasizes valuable commercial traits like calving ease, weight gain, and ribeye area. Red Angus bulls are a great cross if your herd needs better carcasses, maternal characteristics, or thriftiness. See http://redangus.org/ for more info.

Unfortunately, cow milk is only useful as a human beverage.

I see a new market for milk baths!

Yeah, but then everyone will want organic milk baths, so they won't be able to use the milk for that either

Or a cow beverage. Could this milk be useful for feeding to calves?

Thanks, Crito. I glad someone else sees the absurdity of drinking another animal's milk.

Yes it can be sold as Class B product (not organic) (usually to cheese manufacturers). It just can't be sold as organic.

I think 'wasting' it is good. Once you find something useful for it, it perverts the incentives. A sick cow should be considered a complete waste with no benefit.

I think there is a lot of ground between pouring something down the drain and it being worth its weight in gold.

I think that banning of antibiotic use in livestock generally focuses on the preemptive addition of antibiotics in feed. Antibiotic additives are associated with increased weight gain for the animals, as well as letting feed lots put more animals in denser quarters while keeping disease rates down. These direct economic drivers are why industry has fought the regulations for so long - despite the long-term detrimental societal health costs. It's pretty much a classic case of an economic externality needing regulation.

Edit: here's a reference link http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-...

They use antibiotics in part because they keep animals in such close proximity. Disease spreads quickly in those conditions. In other words, they're creating the conditions that you would say justify the use of antibiotics.

You can't leave a loophole, or else companies will simply take advantage of it, even if it's to the detriment of society as a whole.

I wholeheartedly agree :) However in the American meat industry, terminally ill animals are universally culled in short order.

Shit, this may not apply to the dairy industry however. I found this on an organic dairy website http://www.oberweis.com/web/milk.asp:

"Organic certification requires that milk be discarded for 12 months after antibiotic use. This has the unfortunate side effect of making a sick cow such a financial burden to a farm that it must frequently be killed. When this happens, organic farmers generally milk the sick cow (and sell her milk to be bottled as organic) as she gets sicker and sicker and as the quality of her milk deteriorates. She is slaughtered once her milk approaches legal limits."

So that sucks.

Does anyone have any statistics on how many dairy cows are killed per year because of this?

I suspect we are looking at a lesser-of-two-evils scenario: would you rather have a small number of cows culled each year because of sickness, or a large number of cows living in feedlots and pre-emptively given antibiotics because of squalid living conditions?

This. Would be nice to have some stats but I suspect you're right.

Another excellent reason to not eat meat.

It's dead in the end either way. If you assume we're going to eat it.

Is it worth an extra animal's worth of meat for an extra animal's worth of anti-bacterial resistance, that's the core question here. If we're not using these antibiotics so widely to prevent the infection in the first place how does that scale?

It may be better, in the long run, just to say 'no antibiotics in animals' and kill those that become ill out of hand. Otherwise I can see this becoming an easy out for farmers - they could still keep the animals in atrocious conditions, knowing that they can use AB to cure them after they become ill - and if a large number of them become ill then we'll be in exactly the same pickle we are now.

I'm not against antibiotics being used to treat individual sick animals. That's a whole different proposition from employing them as a food supplement and just dosing the entire herd as a prophylactic.

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