It is said the main ideal feed for livestock is based on corn, and historically, 60% of the U.S. corn crop is consumed by the livestock industry. [1] Today, the circumstances have changed. Some researchers found corn has potential as an alternative energy source and biodegradable plastic. People have set their mind out reconsidering the value of corn, it could be no longer feed to livestock if there are substitutions. Now, it is the time for claiming that farmers should not be required to follow traditional feeding standards.
Corn is not the only choice for main feed that farmers can have. According to Dan Loy, extension beef specialist, grains or bakery byproducts could be a substitute feed for corn.[2] In addition, David Funderburke, livestock nutritionist at Cape Fear Consulting says, “Sweet products, because they are high in energy, can be good for livestock.”[3] There are many food manufactures who throw away a lot of useless products every day, such as burned, or broken food products, and some manufactures have started to sell these wastes to farmers as feed. “Do anything to recycle.” Hiroshi Kika, a senior manager at Nissin Foods, says.[4] These days, manufactures are responsible to reduce wastes as much as possible in terms of concern with the environment, and they are conducting efforts to create the cleaner surroundings.
The value of corn is changing as the possibility for it to be used as an alternative energy source has been found, and supposing there are substitutions for corn as feed, farmers should be concerned about the more serious problems in their life. The environment problem is one of the most important issues that humankind faces, and corn could be a help for producing harmless products for the environment, such as biodegradable plastic and biofuel. Even though biodegradable plastic is not so hard as fossil oil based plastic, it turns into dust with the help of bacteria, and it can be used as the nutrition for growing corn. Many countries are getting started to use the alternative energy. For example, in 2006, 1.8 billion bushels were consumed to produce 4.9 billion gallons of renewable fuel in U.S.[5], Japan announced Biomass Nippon Strategy in 2002 and set the goal of using 500,000 kl of biomass energy for transportation by 2010 [6].
Through the history, corn has been farmer’s traditional feeds, and it is said corn provides essential nutrients for animals. Animals, including humans, are what they eat, and supposing humans care about their quality of food, we should care about what livestock eat as well because we are consuming them as food, and it is a ecological chain. Ideally, livestock producers like to feed their pigs and cattle a mixture consisting of about 70% corn, plus soybean meal, fat and vitamins. [7] Even though using corn as an alternative energy resource could be good for the environment, there are many other possible natural resources, such as solar, and geothermal. People need to work to grow corn, that means corn needs energy to grow, while natural resources give us a power without as much process. In favor of corn however, natural resources are not so efficient in terms of affordance and time, they need huge budgets to investigate and develop, and they take a longer span of time to construct. Speaking for the health of food, agrichemical is much more serious an issue than snacks. A lot of chemicals are used for eradicant and preservable reasons, and some agrichemical contains poisons; people would prefer to eat less healthy than poisoned food.
Historically, situations of our lives have been changed, and every time people have figured out the solution to adapt. Corn is no longer the only food for livestock, but it is also becoming the basis of our life. Some would say providing corn for livestock is wasting the ethanol resource, and others would say it is nutritionally the best. Both of these opinions have strong beliefs behind their insistence, and it would be difficult to reach an agreement. Still people should compromise at some point, as that is what people have done for centuries.
1,3,4,7. http://online.wsj.com/public/article_pri…
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/li…
5. http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/main/index.a…
6. http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/バイオ… (ref: http://www.biomass-asia-workshop.jp/biom…)
0 Response to “Corn for Livestock”