• Home Page
• Cruelty
• Animals on Farms
• Experimentation
• Wildlife
• Sport and Entertainment
• Nutrition
• Recipes
• Animal Law
• Eating Wildlife
• Meat and the Environment
• Cruelty Free Products
• Vegetarian Restaurants

• Things to do
• School activities
• About us
• Contacts us
• Membership
• Mail us
• Links
• Credits

Web

animalliberation.org.au

• About Animal Liberation
• Pigs
• Battery Hens
• Dairy
• Chickens
• Live Sheep Export
• Adelaide Free Range Egg Outlets
• Compassionate Recipes
• Companion Animals
• Product Testing on Animals
• Can greenies eat meat?
• Cattle methane
• Milking the Murray
• The real cost of chicken
• CSIRO's Cancer Diet
• Eating Water
• Eating Plants

• Greenhouse Gases
• Water Usage Quiz
• Bush Tucker
• Climate Change

• New South Wales
• Queensland
• Victoria
• Tasmania
• Animals Australia

Cattle feedlots

Cattle feedlots

Increasing numbers of cattle are being sent to feedlots to be fattened for the last few months of their lives. In 1996, feedlots had a capacity for 851,000 cattle at any one time (1). In June 1998 there were just over half a million cattle in feedlots (2).

Most feedlots are in Queensland and NSW. Some of them are very large. For example, Beef City near Toowoomba has a 25,000 cattle capacity, and Whyalla near Goondiwindi has a 30,000 cattle capacity.

In a feedlot, cattle are fed a high energy grain diet to fatten them quickly. This high energy diet is an unnatural one for cattle, who normally spend up to 9 hours a day grazing pasture. Even though they are introduced to the grain diet gradually, acidosis and other nutritional diseases are the most common health problems. Acidosis is when too much acid is produced in the rumen. Low levels of antibiotics may be mixed into the cattle's feed over a long period to help prevent the bloat and acidosis caused by an unnatural diet. This leads to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, some of which already cause disease in humans. For example, in the US and Europe humans have caught the antibiotic-resistant, disease-producing Salmonella typhimurium DT104 from cattle. For more information on this point, go to Antibiotics in agriculture .

In 1991-2 the feedlot industry used around 1 million tonnes of grain, mainly sorghum and barley with some wheat. About 20% of the beef is for the Australian market, the rest is exported, with Japan the main market (3).

Cattle are taken to the feedlot at 12-14 months of age. For the domestic market they are kept there for 60-70 days. The Japanese like fat beef, so for the export market the cattle are grain fed for 120-150 days, possibly as long as 300 days (1).

A feedlot has traditionally been a series of bare paddocks, all filled with cattle. According to the Code of Practice, each animal may be given as little space as 9m2. Even though many feedlots are in hot parts of the country, not all provide shade and shelter.

In 1991 2500 cattle died of heat stroke on the huge Whyalla feedlot near the Queensland-NSW border. This feedlot now provides shade for its 30,000 cattle. However, the Code of Practice still allows feedlots to be unshaded. It makes the weak statement: " The provision of shade or alternative means of cooling, such as misters or sprays, may be required and should be considered where the temperature exceeds 30ºC for an annual period of 750 hours " (emphasis added).

In late February 2000, 1250 cattle died of heat stress in the Prime City feedlot in the Riverina. In this area cattle are not required by the Code of Practice to have shade. Rockdale Beef, another feedlot in the Riverina, lost less than 50 of its 50,000 cattle during the same hot spell, but it provides shade for all cattle (4).

The Code allows many cattle to be uncomfortable or stressed by heat, even though the benefits of shade can be demonstrated. Studies in the inland areas of the country show that cattle eagerly use shade when it is available and eat and drink in the cooler parts of the day. Chewing cud is an important activity for normal functioning of the digestive system. Around Alice Springs, cattle chew cud when resting in the shade, not when in the sun (5).

At any one time there are millions of people starving, and yet each year 1 million tonnes of grain are fed to cattle in Australian feedlots to provide a luxury item for the wealthy Japanese market. Cattle are very inefficient at converting grain into flesh that can be eaten by humans. According to the Queensland Department of Primary Industries, it takes 7.45kg of feed to produce 1.1kg of weight gain (6). Not all of the weight gain is edible, because it includes bones, fat, and so on. There would be more food available to humans if they ate the grain fed to cattle, rather than the cattle.

Feedlots bring large numbers of animals into one area, and so accumulate huge quantities of waste. A 450kg steer produces 29kg of wet manure and urine each day, so a large feedlot with 30,000 animals produces 870,000 kg of excrement every day! This waste can seep into ground water, or run off into creeks and rivers, encouraging blooms of the toxic blue-green algae. In addition, feedlots produce dust, noise and odours, as well as attracting flies.

A Senate Standing Committee report had no doubt that feedlots have the potential to pollute, and expressed great concern about the lack of research on the extent of actual pollution caused by feedlots (3). A large section of the National Guidelines for Beef Cattle Feedlots in Australia is about containing pollution.

References