Poor cows. Feedlots suck anyway. I only buy pasture-raised beef. Can’t feedlot people just turn the cattle out into the field? Or is it totally snow-covered?
-—feedlot people-—? The typical feedlot has in the neighborhood of 30,000 feeders. Once the animals are in the finishing stage you just can’t turn them loose to graze especially in winter after the fields that might be available have already been grazed. And trucking them back to the growers is out of the question.
Smaller custom feedlots, say 200,300,400 animals have the same problem. The areas of the country that had a drought of one level or another were already short of stores. Then remember that the chicoms had a bad year a year ago and they’ve been here buying our reserves. Eastern Washington, the Palouse, grows about 80 million tons of grain stuff/year and typically 80% of that goes to Asia. This past year they took it all. But if it makes you feel any better we kept some Chinese guys from losing weight?
Red Deer, Alberta webcam.
At nine to eleven months of age, cattle are typically moved to a feedlot where they are raised to a finished weight of about 635 kg.
The feed lot is just that, the place they fatten them up before the slaughter.
Feedlots don’t have fields.
“Poor cows. Feedlots suck anyway. I only buy pasture-raised beef. Can’t feedlot people just turn the cattle out into the field? Or is it totally snow-covered?
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The cattle have their rumens (stomachs) used to eating a highly tuned corn based diet .
Taking them off that suddenly would greatly harm them.