Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to pressure from its buyers. Whether this transition evolves to
an industry-wide phenomenon remains unclear.
Growth Hormones in Livestock Agriculture
Beef Cattle
One of the authors once took a college class giving him
hands-on experience caring for newborn calves. Every morn-
ing for two weeks he would drive around a pasture looking for
calves born the previous night. Once a newborn was spotted, he
would castrate the animal if it was a male, attach an identifica-
tion tag in its ear, and inject into the calf's ear a small pellet con-
taining synthetic growth hormones (often, estrogen). With this
hormone the calf would be healthier and grow faster. The hor-
mone's impact on cattle growth is so large that ranchers receives
between $5 and $10 for every $1 they spend on the hormone.
Many years later the author was talking to a cattle producer
who remarked that the use of growth hormones was causing
young women to mature faster. The author laughed, as the
statement seemed so outrageous that he assumed the farmer
was joking—but he was not.
If you research the issue (but not a lot) you can see where
the farmer is coming from. You are putting growth hormones
into cattle, so it is only logical that the hormones might be
present in the beef, possibly causing changes in the person
eating the beef. The rumor that this causes early puberty has
some basis in fact. One of the worst scandals to hit the dairy
industry was in 1974, when cattle feed was accidentally laced
with a flame retardant called PBB and fed to thousands of
cows in Michigan. Before the accident could be discovered,
most Michigan citizens had drunk milk from those cows. The
key detail is that this PBB mimics estrogen, and there is some
evidence that pregnant mothers who drank more of this milk
gave birth to girls that matured earlier.
Add to this true story the fact that synthetic growth hor-
mones have been used on a large scale since the 1960s, and that
