EPA The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United States federal government.It has the responsibility of maintaining and enforcing a variety of environmental laws, in consultation with state governments. Richard Nixon actually started this agency in 1970. He first started it to fix national guidelines and to monitor and enforce them. Basically the EPA exists to protect human health and the environment.
USDA is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry and egg products. Tom vilsack is
currently the secretary of the USDA and has been since 2009. The USDA makes sure that all animals are healthy and in good shape when they are sold to be eaten. If we didn’t have these two agencies, then our market would be totally unsafe. We wouldn’t even know what we were eating. Especially children could get very sick and even die. They are responsible to make sure the meat is good and if not recall it if it was sold. Back a couple decades ago, they couldn’t find what was wrong with the meat until someone ate it. Now though we have the technology and smarts to figure out how sick a cow is before it even gets cut for meat. This agency saves a lot more day to day lives then you’d think. It has evolved into something very helpful. Saving a lot of people from all of these horrible diseases out there. The USDA is a great program and we should really help to motivate them even more.
Implants work in conjunction with the natural hormones in the animal’s body resulting in increased weight gain, improved feed efficiency and leaner carcasses. This is done through the practicing of nutrients to support more lean tissue or muscle growth. “Estrogenic compounds stimulate the animal’s body to increase cell division resulting in increased muscle and skeletal growth rates”. Androgenic compounds result in an increase in muscle mass by increasing protein synthesis and slowing the rate of muscle protein degradation. The result of implanting cattle is the production of a desirable product which takes less feed to produce in a shorter amount of time. So basically you are just making more money and time doing this. In the past this wasn’t really a big thing. Now though it is becoming more desirable than it used too. Just because of how advanced our technology actually is. To do the implant you need to familiarize yourself with the implant gun and ensure the gun is loaded properly.
Hold ear with one hand and insert the needle of the implant gun under the skin on the backside of the ear. The implant should be deposited in the middle third of the ear. Once the needle is in place under the skin hold your thumb over the area of insertion to hold the pellets in place when the needle is retracted. “Implanting too close to the head, crushing the pellets during implantation or implanting into a blood vessel results in rapid absorption of the pellets and contributes to side effects such as increased bullying in newly implanted animals and vaginal prolapse in heifers. Avoid implanting into the cartilage ribs, as this will decrease the absorption of the implant”.
After implantation is complete, feel for the pellets under the skin of the ear to ensure the implant has been properly deposited. That is how you properly do an implant. Honestly I have no problem with people doing this just make sure they don’t overdose it on the cattle.
A typical dairy farm in the upper Midwest might have 50 to 100 milking cows. The herd is totally confined 6 months of the year, and during the remaining months spend part of each day in an earthen lot adjacent to the barn. Manure is collected daily from the barn by means of a tractor scraper. The semi-solid manure is scraped into a low-walled waste storage structure and applied to the land when it can be incorporated into the soil for plant nutrients. Liquids from the dairy, including wash water for milking equipment, are collected in a storage pond with a minimum 180-day storage capacity and applied to the land when the application fits into the overall management of the operation. Rainfall runoff from the earthen lots is also collected in the same storage pond. Clean water is diverted away from the earthen lot, and roof runoff from the barns is carried away from the waste storage facilities.
In fact Kansas has the highest rate of manure waste. Some people say that America is over looking one of the most important renewable resources, cow manure. Mostly any kind and we have millions of pounds of this stuff and we are just wasting it. When we could be using it to help out our planet more. Though some people think that we shouldn’t be using it at all. Also some think that it could be a danger getting into our drinking water. So basically drinking poop. Nobody wants that but, it might come to it. So I think we should just be prepared and get ready to use it. In fact some facilities are just wasting this manure and leaving them with the cattle. Then Just putting more dirt under it. Leaving the manure with these cattle can be really bad for their health especially if you don’t clean their hooves every once in a while. How would you feel if you were to stay in a small fenced in area and then have to walk around in your poop. Besides all of that, these cows can get a lot of very bad diseases while being in there without it clean. You would be surprised on how many facilities don’t clean their cattle. There are many ways the slaughter facilities get rid of the waste and this is water disposal. This is when you basically just pour it in the ocean. This is very bad for our environment now the fish could be eating the manure. Which would be kind of funny seeing that. Anyways the fish could get very sick from it including a lot more animals. It’s just gross thinking that you could be swimming in a bunch of cow manure. Although there are a lot of different ways they sell there waste. Like selling them to local pet stores. All of the bones and manure said to have 45% over the whole facility. So if they can sell these and make money it’s a double win. Usually they will sell them to the pet store. Then make dog bones or for the meat they don’t want they still can sell it. Then they make it usually into animal feed.
There is a lot of different styles you can use to set up your facilities. None of them are exactly the same. It just all depends on what you want going through your chutee. What kind of cows. Are you doing cows or bulls or heifers. All of these things take place when trying to figure out how to set your facilities up. Obviously the more money you have. The greater your facilities can actually be. Also you should include how many farm hands you have. So the greater the facility the more hands you are gonna need to take care of the cattle.
Electronic EIDs for cattle is a huge benefit, these are some of the main points on getting these tags. It offers another form of identification for each animal. Sometimes visual tags get lost become snagged on a fence where as EID tags are small and are designed for high damage rates.
An animal can more quickly be identified in the chute by just scanning it rather than needing to have the animal be completely still to read a visual tag or tattoo number.
Scanning EID tags instead of manually writing down an ear tag number, offers tremendous time saving benefits while not making any errors. As cattle are being worked or loaded into a trailer their EID tag can be scanned while they are on the move. This benefits a lot of ranchers very much. Instead of working a lot harder now you can work easier and faster. It’s just crazy how far along our technology has really come. Now we can keep track and check in every cattle. Just by scanning his ear tag.
Now you can actually get both tags called matched pair tags. This helps you put just in case the software network is being used or broke down. You still got the number to just do it old fashioned.
Well over all I had some fun searching up about cow poop. Almost everything about cows. I totally did not know that world widely cows poop themselves one trillion pounds every year. That's Just crazy to me. Although whoever figured out how to use there bones and meat from cattle to put in dog food is a really smart thinker. I just never would’ve thought that it comes from cattle. I mean it makes sense now that I understand where all of their waste goes. I think this is a lot better then just throwing it into the water. That just sounds really gross to me and someone actually swimming in there and finds it. I would probably need some kind of therapy.