BYPRODUCT FEED WARNING

            If you are direct marketing and are not using ethanol byproducts, you need to tell your customers about it.  This needs to be a major claim on your label.

            There are several reasons for this.

            One, sulfuric acid is used in the ethanol production process.  This leaves the byproduct feed potentially high in sulfur.

            High feed sulfur levels can cause polioencephalomalacia.  This is a deadly form of polio that creates brain lesions in the cattle.

            To the average consumer who hears about this, it is going to sound (and look) a lot like Mad Cow Disease.  This is not a good thing for beef demand.

            The problem is that every batch of byproducts potentially has a different level of sulfur and requires testing.

            The stock water also requires frequent monitoring for sulfur as this can push the total sulfur level into the danger zone.

            How many small-scale byproduct feeders are set up to do these tests?

            With the significant price difference between byproducts and corn and producers feeding an ever greater percentage of byproduct, how long will it be until someone crosses this sulfur threshold and staggering, drooling cows are on the evening news?

            Two, ethanol byproducts are highly susceptible to potentially deadly molds called mycotoxins.

            The residual mash produced is both hot and wet, which is an ideal environment for mold growth.

            It is dumped out of the centrifuge onto a concrete floor and a front loader loads it into a dump truck for transport to a dairy or feedlot.

            The factory floor, the tractor bucket and the interior of the truck are all potential sources of yeast infection, which imitates mold formation, and must be constantly kept disinfected to prevent contamination.

            On the farm, during warm weather the wet byproducts should be stored in sealed bags or an oxygen-limiting silo to prevent oxygen access as the molds are aerobic.  They should also be stored out of the sunlight to help keep temperatures down.

            Because this feed is rendered bacterially sterile by the production process, any mold that alights on it can grow extremely rapidly and can reach problematic levels in just a few hours.

            Knowing industrial plants and farms, what do you think the chances are of all these surfaces being kept sterile and disinfected?

            While these molds can make beef cattle extremely sick and permanently damage them, it really gets scary for consumers with dairy animals.

            Grain-produced alfatoxins is a major carcinogen and can actually survive the ethanol production process.

Alfatoxin can pass through in the cows’ milk and is not killed by pasteurization.

Third, research at Kansas State has found that cattle that ate brewer’s grains from beer manufacturing were six times more likely to have the deadly-to-humans form of E.coli than cattle fed corn.

The study’s authors warn of “serious ramifications” to the feeding of all forms of distiller’s grains and predict there will eventually be a strong consumer backlash against beef from animals fed ethanol byproducts.

Add all of these factors together and you have a ticking time bomb that will eventually (there’s that word again) go off.

Now is the time to position your products to take advantage of the consumer backlash that will result.

Tell consumers loudly and frequently that you feed nothing but grass!!!