This is nuts. My neighbor brews every month or so and gives me the spent mash for my hens. They love it, but I never try to let them eat too much at once. The stuff is like candy for them.
I can’t understand what this rule is supposed to accomplish. It’s ludicrous to say it’s about purity. Have you ever watched chickens eat? They crap in their own food and water and mix it all up. You can try to keep things clean, but it’s a constant battle. The mash will last for a couple of days, but it goes sour pretty quick unless you keep it cold.
It’s nuts if you credit the cartoon version of the rule that BoingBoing chose to publish. If you read the actual rule you’ll find that it basically requires producers to perform a risk analysis and develop appropriate responses if significant risks are discovered.
I should have been more clear, as my question is: ARE they making these grains a large part of their diet like to do with corn, to fatten them up (and ultimately make them unhealthy)? I get the concept that grass = grain = seeds = corn, but still wondering how much of these spent grains make up their feed.
So, I guess the rule here is injecting them full of steroids and antibiotics, and feeding them GMO corn are all OK since Monsanto or someone else with big lobbyist money is profiting. But let’s not do something that has been going on for thousands of years because nobody is making a buck off of it.
I don’t buy the argument that the rule serves anyone but rulemakers. If there is a risk to people or critters, where are all the sick critters and people? I’m in Wisconsin, home of brewing and farming and happy microbes. And lots of crazy wingnuts and libertarians that I almost never agree with. But this time I do.
Then again, I’m fine if they apply this rule or any other to ethanol plants. Do not like.
And a reasonable person would conclude that a restaurant microbrewery who wants to donate their grains to Farmer John would not find it an objectionable, resource-intensive task to produce
A hazard analysis;
Preventive controls;
Monitoring procedures;
Corrective Action procedures;
Verification procedures;
A recall plan.
?
That’s what’s wrong here: daft people who think that this kind of crap is making things better and safer. LOL.
What I don’t get is why would farmers need protection from the distillers? If you’re a farmer, stick your nose in a load of spent grains and take a whiff… if it’s sour, tell them you don’t want their waste. If they want to be able to deliver it, it had better be fresh and clean, or else, NO SALE. Seems like a healthy-functioning market could take care of this non-issue.
I’ve lived in Canada, the UK and spent some significant time at my grandparents’ place in the US, not a representative sample of the world to be sure. My point is that the USA, despite all of what it is doing wrong still gives you a significant amount of leeway to live how you want. In my experience Americans are more likely to chafe and fight against insane-bureaucracy rather than sit and take it like they do in the UK. Canada, as always, is somewhere in the middle.
It really depends on each farm- there’s no clear answer. But chickens, for example, eat a lot of grain- even free-range, pasture-happy chickens eat a lot of grain. The spent grains from beer companies are perfectly in line with their diet. A wise farmer will let the chickens roam around daily, despite having this free grain, so that the chickens can vary their diet with grubs and such from the field. So, like anything else, a farmer who keeps their animals inside and feeds them 100% beer scraps isn’t going to do anyone much good- but this issue really has nothing to do with that. The FDA is laying the groundwork to fuck with something that works well. As usual.
Which would take ADDITIONAL energy and machinery. Or. . . just truck it to a farm, and use it as fuel for livestock. . . . which is the more rational alternative ???
AH! I forgot the chickens. I was purely thinking beef. Yes, I wish the government would spend more time making slaughterhouses that don’t use Temple Grandin’s methods, and feedlots in general, illegal.
So far zero discussion on why the FDA might be seeking such controls. Not my country, so I won’t do the research for you, but could this be in relation to control of prions? I know there have been cases of animal byproducts like blood being added to feed to boost the nutritional value, as a result closing one downright dangerous feedback loop. Prions are serious business and such drastic measures potentially justifiable given the possible consequences. As others have said, it’s also a proposal and the FDA may adjust to avoid unintentional impacts.
‘Next on WHAGARBLWTF News: Are There Prions In Your Beer? New FDA rules to protect ANIMALS from craft beer! Could switching over to that fancy ale from Bud Light be killing brain cells more than just the old-fashioned way? Over to you, Bob…’
I’ll bet that has something to do with it. Maybe the rule has something to do with the pet food crisis in 2007. Remember that? Millions of pound of pet food contaminated with melamine were recalled. However it was not destroyed.
At the time there were no rules on what to do with the recalled pet food. So odd lot buyers snapped it up and fed it to 20 million chickens and 56,000 hogs in the state of Indiana.
This pet food killed about eight thousands of dogs and cats and sicked twice as many.
We asked the USDA/FDA if this tainted feed going to chickens and hogs was safe for humans to consume. They put out a weak paper saying the “dilution effect” will cover it. No testing, just basing it on 10 year old rat studies. The did NOT reveal the name of the company that sold these chickens and hogs into the human food supply. Why not?
People were afraid the same food that killed their dogs and cats would then hurt them when consumed the chicken or pigs. The USDA was more concerned with the profits of the unnamed chicken and pig producer.
Did anyone get sick from this? We’ll never know because, like a lot of cats and dogs who got sick, it showed up in ways that could have been caused by other means. People have kidney problems all the time. In this case it was easier to trace because the pets all consumed the same food.
What I don’t get is that there still are slaughterhouses and feedlots that don’t use Temple Grandin’s methods and recommendations. It’s been proven empirically that they produce better meat, are more humane, and cause less product loss. Put simply, these methods are objectively better for business. Why any slaughterhouse wouldn’t incorporate her methods is beyond me, unless they are actually trying to be cruelty factories instead of meat businesses.
Well to be fair, most of humanity has spent it’s entire existence covered in shit, and the ones who weren’t were kings (especially if they got a sword from a strange women lying in a pond).
