Why Regenerative Agriculture Prevents Livestock Disease like Avian Flu
The Impact of Factory Farming on Meat Quality
There’s no denying that factory farming is producing lesser quality meat, eggs, and milk. Organic and regenerative practices have proven time and time again that the value of the end product is so much higher, both in the quality of the product and the weight of your wallet. We’ve covered the specific areas, species, and soil health in depth on this channel, and we’re going to do it more so in the future, so we’ll spare you the nitty-gritties for this round. Today we’d like to look at the whole picture, and get into why it’s the best way to go in the long term when it comes to fighting disease among your herds and flocks.
The Devastating Impact of Avian Flu on Farms
The recent wave of avian flu caused farms to euthanize entire flocks of fowl—not just chickens, but ducks, quail, and turkeys went through the gallows too. Millions of birds have been put down, and scores of farmers have had to sell out. Not to mention the dairy cattle farms recently affected. They’ve lost everything.
The Cycle of Disease in Factory Farming
Just like the pandemic, this plague is just one of many before it, and it’s only a matter of time before another comes along. Statistically speaking, humans can expect at least two new plagues to run through the population every 50 to 100 years. And we’re the lucky ones. Animals get a new viral or bacterial enemy every decade or so. But what does this have to do with regenerative farming? Well, it’s got everything to do with regenerative ag, actually.
Comparing Health: Factory Farming vs. Regenerative Farming
Imagine the difference in health between two people. One eats only processed foods, never goes out of their house, gets minimal to no exercise, and never sees a fresh fruit or vegetable. The other person exercises regularly, eats organic foods that have little to no preservatives, and they get out in the fresh air every day. Who do you think is going to need medical intervention more often? The first guy, duh. He’s going to be a walking heart attack waiting to happen, whereas the second guy is going to have the longest life expectancy, almost no need for doctor’s appointments, and he’ll be generally happier and be as mentally sound as his healthy body is. The same school of thought goes for your animals. The more stressed they are and the more they’re crammed into small spaces, the more diseases they’ll get.
Combating the spread is so inconceivably simple, and cheap, that it’s rather perplexing why we’re still so insistent on staying with factory farming.
How Close Quarters Spread Avian Flu
Let’s start with feed. In a factory setting, animals are kept in their own small separate compartments, but their feed troughs are usually one long farrow, with no separation between the animal’s holdings. Inevitably, the feed that's been in front of one animal gets pushed to the next compartment as it eats or drinks. Cross-contamination is inevitable.
Even with the best ventilation, in those close quarters, you’re asking for airborne viruses to hop from one pig to the next. If one gets sick, they all get sick.
Nutrition to Prevent Avian Flu
If they’re not eating, ruminant animals need to keep their jaws in motion. Even on the concrete floor or the small pen that hasn’t had anything growing in it for years, they’ll try to root. It’s just in their nature to do so. There’s nothing growing on the factory floor, so they sample the only other thing that’s there: feces. Besides the obvious spread of parasites, the bovine’s sensitive stomachs will react to foreign bodies. A steed will drop dead from a stomach bug faster than it would from most other viruses.
Animals don’t need a lot of space, but they need open space. Just getting them out in the field solves half of your problems already. Out there, in the open, they’re not just going to feed themselves, they’re going to medicate themselves too. Why do you think we advise that livestock eat the native edible weeds? All of them are lending some medicinal value to the animal in some form or another. That's why they seek them out. Your milking cows eat the clover first because it’s good for milk production and for recovery after giving birth.
Black walnut, wormwood, and skullcap are all going to take care of parasites. If your goat has a fever, he’s not going to get up and come tell you; he's going to seek out feverfew, nettles, or berry bushes. We can go on and on listing the various natural weeds and grasses and the many things that they can cure. No matter where you live, there’s something growing that’ll cure something, and your animals know it and they’ll seek it out themselves without you ever even realizing that they might have been ill at all. Simply because they follow their instincts and actively seek out what they need all on their own.
Most livestock are fed, at least partially, from store-bought feed, or with hay, but getting them out there to seek their own sustenance at least to some degree is going to cut down on your veterinary bill exponentially.
Then there’s the fact that a diverse gut biome is going to lead to a healthier animal. Every study out there indicates that livestock have stronger immune systems when their gut has a variety of bacteria. 99 percent of bacteria are good bacteria, and it’s helping us digest our food, break down biological mass in the soil…those little guys are busy keeping our world, and our bodies clean. But the ridiculous amount of antibiotics that factory-bred animals are being given kills all of the good bacteria off. This heavily impacts how efficiently they digest the already subpar food that they’re being fed.
Sure they’ll be putting on weight, because all bought-for feed has copious amounts of carbohydrates from corn, but what little else that feed has in the sense of nutrients just can’t be broken down or absorbed by the gut as it should be because there’s no bacteria to do the digestive work.
Have you ever gotten antibiotics at the doctor’s? Have you noticed that it’s always given with a probiotic? That probiotic is just filled with good bacteria, to replace what the antibiotics have killed off. If you don’t take the probiotic, then patients become horribly constipated. Animals get all of the antibiotics, but none of them are allowed to replace the bacteria that they actually need after receiving those doses. So it’s no wonder that they aren’t getting in all the nutrients that they should, now is it?
The Impact of Nutrition on Animal Health
Since we’re on the subject of digesting nutrients efficiently, they’re not getting all of the nutrition they need from the food being placed in front of them anyway. Soy and corn make up most of our animal’s feed, and those are the most genetically altered crops on the market. Putting aside the alterations that have been made on them in the lab already, it's the manner in which they grow that’s concerning. Since the soil’s been ruined by pesticides and all sorts of other poisons, there just aren’t any microorganisms left in the ground to break down the compost, so we bring in fertilizer. And all that fertilizer’s been filled with more nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium than a plant can possibly need. This causes them to grow at unnaturally fast rates, and since they’re preoccupied with growing and growing and growing, there’s just not enough time to store the nutrients in the grain as they would have done naturally.
A study in 1997 proved that all commercially grown vegetables had decreased their nutritional value by 20 percent. That’s all of the major nutrients, Vitamins, A, D, all of the B vitamins. Iron and Calcium dropped all the way down to 30 percent less on average. 1997 was almost 30 years ago, what do you think those numbers have gone down to since? We’ll never know for sure, because every study that’s been done since has been contested so fiercely that we’re never going to see the results of those observations. And that was just the vegetables. Corn and soy are much more aggressively treated on and off the field. We shudder to think how little actual nutrients are left in them!
The Consequences of Malnutrition in Livestock
America’s gotten sicker every year, and so have our animals. And it all starts in the field. If your cattle are malnourished, it’s not going to matter how much fat you’ve got on that steed’s body, its immune system can’t work on carbohydrates alone. So no wonder our livestock are falling like flies under the immense pressure from disease. We’re not giving them the tools to fight off infection naturally.
Lower Stress to Prevent Avian Flu
And finally, we have stress. If an animal is under stress, everything goes downhill. Diseases start cropping up, parasites take hold, fertility goes down for the girls, or the males just won’t perform. Hair loss, a downward trend in milk and egg production…you name it and stress is never a good addition to any animal. Bovines are especially prone to stress-related deaths. If conditions are bad enough, they’ll just drop dead for apparently no reason at all. But who wouldn’t be stressed out if you’re putting on pounds of excess weight, but you’re always hungry. Your flatmate just died and all you have to graze on is another animal’s droppings, all inside a hot and humid building or pen that’s packed with so many bodies and noise that it’s impossible to hear anything outside of other panicked animals?
But outside, they can eat what they need, keep their jaws moving till their heart’s content, and they’ll get more nutrition for half the cost, leading to a superior product and minimal health concerns.
The Benefits of Ancient Practices in Modern Farming
We like to bring up ancient practices on this channel, but how else do you think the world was fed 300 years ago? We just didn’t have the antibiotics or the vets. Animals were kept in environments where they were naturally inclined to be, and they ate what was growing beneath their hooves. They certainly weren’t kept in one single space. They’ve always been moved from field to field, allowing the previous field to recover while they cleared the next.
Conclusion
We don't need acres upon acres of land to employ rotational grazing, nor do we need to run just one species of livestock at a time. If anything, the more variation of animals you have going, the better.
Organic feed might cost you a bit more, but there are options available around you that are affordable, you just have to look for them. Or if you do have a little more acreage to work with, you can absolutely grow it yourself. It’s amazing how much you can do with very little land if you just keep the rotation going in a constant circle, where one field or animal feeds another and another and another. Nature and farming are one and the same in more ways than we’ve been led to believe. Our insistence on milking the system by pumping it full of fixers and chemical aids has done the exact opposite of what we intended for it to do. Not only are our crops nutrient deficient, now our animals are too…and they’re suffering and dying from very preventable diseases because they weren’t healthy to begin with.
If your livestock are eating better and living outside as they should be, they will be less prone to disease and their products and fertility will go up. Avian flu, swine flu, SARS, Nipa…whatever the name of the current enemy in the pen is…most of them can be avoided entirely if we just focus on going back to how farming should be done, instead of treating an already raging problem with more antibiotics. Prevention is key, and in this case, all of our farmers going out of business and food security always in the forefront of our worries can become a problem of the past if we just go back to the past and ditch the synthetic farming that’s been causing all of our troubles.
Tell us what health concerns you’re dealing with on your land, and what you’re doing to combat it. Or have you been employing regenerative agriculture to bring health back to your flocks and herds for a long time already? If that’s the case, you know the drill. Let us know in the comments below, and if you liked this video, have a look at some of our other uploads on your screen right now. Or you can subscribe so you don’t miss out on any new content from our team.
See you next time!