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What does ‘farm to fork’ mean to you?
Dan Thomson, a third generation veterinarian from Iowa was invited to speak at the Hinkle’s Prime Cut Angus annual educational forum at the Ella Maxwell Center for the Performing Arts at Nevada High School this past Sunday.
“The thing I really like about the beef industry, there’s many things, but number one is the people that are associated with it,” Thomson said. “Some of the things, even in biblical times, we have used beef to celebrate good things going on — the return of the prodigal son and different things — bring the fatted calf. We’re going to have a feast, we’re going to celebrate I tell people at the veterinary school, ‘when do you ever hear someone that got a raise say by golly we’re going out tonight and we’re gonna have us a sprig of broccoli.”
Thomson is the Jones Professor of Production Medicine at Kansas State University, College of Veterinary Science. He is also host of RFD-TV’s weekly Doc Talk program and is an advisor to several of the beef industry’s largest corporate customers.
He explained that, more importantly, ground beef is third highest in purchases by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients behind soft drinks and fluid milk.
“We really are an industry that feeds the masses,” he said. “From the grocery stores to the finest restaurants in the world, beef stretches all of those socio-economic strata.”
Thompson talked about those opposed to the beef industry, explaining that many do not understand the beef industry’s goal, “is to produce food, not a 1500 pound lap dog.”
He explained that less than 100 years ago, 50 percent of Americans were involved in agriculture.
“We didn’t have to educate or advocate for agriculture,” Thomson said. “Most everybody was involved with agriculture.”
Today, that number is 2 percent.
“Two percent are feeding 100 percent and that means 98 percent have a hard time understanding where food comes from,” Thomson said.
He explained that in developing or third world countries, a much higher percentage of household income is spent on food. In the US, that number is 6.5 percent; Germany is 10.6 percent, Mexico is more than 23 percent, and in Nigeria, 56 percent of a family’s income is spent on food.
“We are the bread basket that has such a bounty that it is unbelievable,” Thomson said. “Not everybody in our country has the same bounty.”
He explained that lower-income families spend a higher portion of their income on food.
Countering the argument that people simply eat out more, Thomson explained the amount of money spent on dining at restaurants has remained steady since 1960 — 4 percent.
“We have declined the amount we spend on food from the grocery store and there is two reasons for that,” he said. “We continually make an affordable product. We improve the efficiency of agriculture. We improve the efficiency of the process of getting it from the hoof to the plate. But the other thing is we have increases in average wage earning, or at least increases in wage earnings in the higher percentile in the U.S.”
“What you find is that the restaurant group, number one, they don’t feed the poor,” Thomson said.
He explained restaurants target people that can afford to have their food planned, cooked and served to them.
“They don’t take food stamps at restaurants,” he said.
Changing topics to food waste, he said, “We throw away a third of the world’s prepared food a day,” or 1.3 billion tons.
“One thing that we are very good at in this industry, sometimes to a fault, is we take all the blame on our selves,” he said.
He gave the example that when one person gets E.-coli from a beef product, the entire industry gets blamed.
“We’re going to talk about the billions of dollars Americans spend for a safe product but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continually improve,” Thomson said. “Society has gotten to the point where everyone has the right and no one has the responsibility. At the end of the day, the only person I can be responsible for is myself … we have one beef industry.”
Thomson said that he considers everyone — producers, processors, retailers, consumers — to all be on the same team. He said beef producers should take pride in their product being in a consumer’s freezer just as an artist would if their painting hung on someone’s wall.
He explained sustainability requires profitability.
He said, “The people who want sustainability, I have learned, are the people who’ve got it.”
“We produce enough food in this world to feed everybody,” Thomson said. “We’re great at growing food, we’re just not very good yet at distributing and I think that is going to be the next phase moving forward.”
In talking about animal welfare, Thomson said that if you asked six different people what it was, they would have six different answers.
“Animal rights groups use animal abuse cases to drive animal welfare policy,” Thomson said. “Animal rights is that you think animals have the same rights as humans. Animal abuse is to intentionally hurt or neglect an animal which is equal to the word animal cruelty.”
Thomson explained that people develop misconceptions about the beef and similar industries based on news reports when something goes wrong — abuse, neglect.
“I can’t keep people from abusing animals just like I can’t keep someone from driving drunk,” he said. “The only thing that gets on the news today is sensationalism of one of those things. The difference is, everybody is living in the neighborhood, they know it’s safe and that doesn’t happen all the time. Two percent feed 100 percent and nobody’s involved with agriculture so they don’t know the difference. It’s the ignorance, the inability to think past it.”
“When I talk about animal welfare, animal welfare is doing the chores, it’s taking care of the animals that take care of us, it’s proper vaccination, it’s nutrition, its shelter, it’s really about taking care of our animals,” he said.
Thomson said more audits of the beef industry would be required in the future.
“Audits are a form of verification because some animals rights groups or some activists groups have asked the retailers not to trust us,” he said.
Thomson said retailers should focus on creating the right experience for consumers and help producers market and sell their product.
“We’ll raise the cows and feed the calves, then slaughter the cattle, they should make hamburgers and french fries as we move forward,” Thomson said.
He compared audits of the farming and ranching industry to standardized tests in education saying it would lower the goals and stifle innovation.
He said the beef industry needs to improve preconditioning in the future — vaccinations, tags.
“We have to prepare these calves for transfer,” Thomson said.
In talking about antibiotic resistance, he said, “For antibiotic resistance to come from the cow to us, we’d have to consume the bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic. That’s first and foremost. One out of ten thousand is the odds of that happening.”
Thomson explained that for producers to administer antibiotics they must have a veterinarian-client-patient relationship approved by the FDA and juris prudence which assures the veterinarian is prescribing antibiotics appropriately.
“Anything that goes to slaughter has anti and post-mortem inspection,” he said. “We even do microbiological testing on every tote of beef that leaves the packing plant. It’s clean or else we’d keep it.”
He said the beef is tested again as it leaves the processors and that states spend millions on making sure the retailers and restaurants where the beef is sold are safe.
“This is a bajillion dollar system like no other in the world that is not just paid for by agriculture, but by anybody that pays taxes, and I’m proud of it,” Thomson said. “It is safe.”
He explained other countries around the world do not all have the same safeguards and with a lack of veterinarians will make heavy use of antibiotics with no regulation adding that humans are more likely to be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from companion animals.
Thompson spoke briefly on natural or organic beef saying the choice should be up to the consumer.
“If we’re going to throw away a technology (steroids) over a blade of grass on a football field, that if we get rid of it … if we raised the same amount of beef — the efficiency we get from steroid implants — we would need a cornfield the size of the state of New York to make up for the loss of efficiency,” Thomson said.
He said he expected traceability to be a bigger issue than natural or organic beef.
“I think the beef industry is poised to emulate the beer industry with micro-brews and specialty beefs and micro-beef organizations,” he said. “I think traceability will be right in the middle of it. We’ll still need commodity beef and we’ll still need ground beef and trim. But I think this may be a new era for us going forward.”
“There is two people that don’t know about the science and the food, the rich and the poor,” Thomson said. “The rich err on the side of safety and the poor just want to eat.”
He explained the U.S. government uses only the price of food to determine poverty level — currently $25,000 for a family of four with two incomes.
“If we increase the cost of production of food and increase the cost of food at the counter and we don’t increase salaries, what will happen to poverty in this country?” Thomson said. “It will go up. We have to be extremely careful about that.”
He explained 25 percent of Americans live in poverty and that levels of food security are approximately equal anywhere in the country
Quoting Bill Gates, Thomson said. “If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits and recognition for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world.”
“At the end of the day, I think genetics and traceability will continue to be the cornerstone and focus of our industry,” Thomson said. “I think that we have a very very bright future in the beef industry because we serve all socio-economic groups and that’s something I am very proud of. We need some strong leadership moving forward to make sure we do not undo all the other things, all the good that has been done by the people before us. They were good thinkers. We need to remember and preserve our heritage while staying on the cutting edge of moving forward and remember the one beef concept.”