We sell our commercial calves to a natural beef program. We get audited by a third party. The audit company flys someone in and we have to go through our computer records with them and then take them on a very detailed site visit to our pastures and working facilities. We've done it twice now, and when I'm finished - although we easily "pass" the audit - I have a kind of sense of being violated when I'm done. For example, they want to see detailed records of calving and want to know which animals had assisted births. That has no relevance to an animal being sold to the feedlot that hired them, but they ask it. And on and on and on.
We did this to ourselves so we are going to have to live with it. The scary part about what A&W is doing if I read it correctly - along with some "branded beef" type operations tied to specific ranches (think Nolan Ryan), is that this sounds like it is setting up corporation to corporation buying agreements - almost along the lines of the Walmart model. If you want to learn what getting the screws to you feels like, talk to a company that has to try to sell their products to Walmart. I've heard some absolute horror stories. This concept may be what gets giant corporate agriculture control of beef production. Up until this point, they've stayed out of the cow-calf side due to the capital involved (low rates of return compared to land investment costs, etc).
I use Zilmax, implants, and other stuff on our show steers (yes - I feed my me and my kids beef that has seen Ace before). Maybe that's why I get sleepy after lunch on Sunday.......However, common sense tells you that you are better off long-term eating meat that hasn't had added hormones, antibiotics, etc. I have a graduate degree in the sciences and deal with chemical risk assessments all the time in my job, so I am relatively well-versed on this subject. The FDA is flat out not openly "bribed" to approve drugs - so those comments are just being cynical. But their risk analysis are based on observable effects in toxicology studies. Not all of this "stuff" is measureable. You've all heard about different chemicals that are found in random tests of human breast milk. It doesn't make the news, but there are bad things going on right now with amphibians world-wide (think frogs) that look like they are likely attributable to synthetic chemicals that unintentionally emulate estrogen and other hormones. Those kinds of chemicals are truly everywhere at very, very low doses (parts per trillion and lower). Something disastrous is happening to bee populations. NOBODY really knows what long term effects are of very low doses of synthetic chemicals and hormones.
Big picture - humans live a lot longer (probably longer than we should) because of the use of chemicals, drugs, and other man-made substances that dramatically reduced disease and improved nutrition at a cheap cost. That doesn't mean there is not a bad side also. Only the relatively rich can afford to worry about those potential bad sides.
I much more worried about the corporate buying power aspect of these things than I am health risks from non-natural raised cattle, but I'm afraid we are going to forced into playing the game whether we like it or not.
