Meat Wagon: Cow-feed misdeeds

More trouble with ethanol waste as cow chow

Posted by Tom Philpott at 4:03 PM on 25 Feb 2008

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat industry.

Remember the good old days, when gigantic meat and dairy producers stuffed cows into feedlots and fed them corn? Sure, cows evolved to eat grass, and corn wears out their livers (and makes their digestive tracts friendly to E. coli 0157, a strain harmless to cows but deadly to humans).

Yet we may soon look back fondly on those days. The government-mandated spike in ethanol production has made corn a pricey luxury for feedlot operators. To cut costs, they're scrambling to substitute scarce corn for abundant distillers grains -- the mush that's left over from corn after the ethanol process.