You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!

I just sat down and realized this the other day, but Carolyn and I have been doing this blog for 3 1/2 years now. 3 1/2 years! It seems like only yesterday we were trying to pick out the format and color scheme, full of ideas on what wonderful things we could blog about. And some days it feels like we’ve been doing this for so much longer than 3 1/2 years, more like 42 months.

But, it is unquestionable that we’re still young at heart.

In this time, we’ve covered a host of topics, some more than once. While certain blog posts have been a hit because they were silly (like this one about coveting thy neighbor’s leaf sweeper), others have been revisited through the years because they are questions many have about raising beef cattle. So for folks that are new to our blog and have always wondered about these topics, we’ve put together a few posts that hopefully can address your cattle questions.

So do you have questions about…

Antibiotic use in beef cattle? Check out this post on how veterinarians choose which antibiotic to use for which disease in cattle. Or this post on antibiotics, CAFOs and Cocker Spaniels (that’ll make you wonder how those three go together). And if that’s not enough, look at this post where I talk how antibiotics are used responsibly to treat cattle in a timely manner. But the post that’s the most central to my beliefs as a veterinarian is this one that addresses the topic of if it is ethical to put special emphasis on antibiotic free beef.

Growth hormones and if they affect the final beef product? Start with this post that shows that not only are hormones safe, but they are necessary for us to reduce our carbon footprint. Then move onto this post that explains why a farmers cannot simply raise more cattle to increase the beef supply.

Why cattle farmers and ranchers castrate the bull calves? There are good reasons for doing this procedure, and a full explanation can be found on this blog post.

Government subsidies in agriculture? Cattle farmers and ranchers to do not receive a check just for raising cattle, which we talk about in this blog post.

Factory farming? What surprises many people is 97% of farms in the U.S. are family farms, which I talk about in these two blog posts, Part I and Part II.

The sustainability of raising beef? The first step is to recognize cattle are great upcyclers of protein, which means they take land that cannot be used for growing crops and turn it into protein humans can use. How important that is to world food security is detailed in this post. With this in mind, it is essential to recognize that grazing cattle is the best way to ensure that appropriate habitat for native plant and animal life is not plowed up to raise crops, as this post talks about. Lastly, it is necessary to recognize sustainability does not look the same in every environment or on every farm in that environment, as this post details.

If these posts can’t answer your questions, then feel free to shoot us an email at thecowdocs@gmail.com. We’ll be happy to answer them, or guide you in the correct direction if we don’t know the answer. Thanks for visiting our blog!

-Jake and Carolyn