Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JUNE 15, 2014 • www. aaalivestock . com
MARKET
Digest O Volume 56 • No. 6
by Lee Pitts
Education is what you get when you read fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
A
Somethings Gotta Give Are males no longer taking animal science at my alma mater because they aren’t interested in studying about animals, or could they not gain admittance because they weren’t smart enough to compete? Either way, it doesn’t speak well for the males of the species, does it? The numbers are a complete flip flop since I went to Cal Poly. Back in the early 1970s life in the animal science department was like the wild, wild west
where the ratio of males to females was 10 to one, and unless the boss had a wife or daughter, a cowboy hardly ever saw a woman. A male in the 1970s had to make a huge sacrifice to be an animal science major because you had about the same chance of having a female friend as a monk entering some foreign outpost monastery. It’s not just Cal Poly either. Women are more than holding their own at animal science departments across the country.
And their dominance didn’t just begin in college. When I was State President of the California Association of the FFA back in 1970 a young woman in a blue and gold jacket was a rare sighting. After all, the National FFA had just voted in 1969 to allow females to enter what was then known as The Future Farmers of America. Today, it’s simply the FFA, and there are 579,678 members in 7,570 chapters in all 50 states. Female membership in the FFA has been on a straight trajectory upward and currently 44% of FFA members are female. In my day we pitied the few FFA girls and thought they'd never be able to compete with us men. How stupid were we? Glance at small town newspapers across the country and you’ll see that FFA judging and leadership teams are skewed heavily to the female side and, continued on page two
Give me cows … lots of cows! Educated Incapacity The trillion dollar hoax BY STEPHEN L. WILMETH
n Texas A&M trials, the unthinkable is taking place. Hamburger from grass fed cattle isn’t safer, healthier, or more palatable than hamburger produced from those corn fed, flatulent launching, confinement lounging fatties that are being accused of poisoning our nation’s clean water supplies. In fact, the opposite may be rearing its scientific, unbiased head. As an example, measured oleic acid (the acid shown to reduce bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol), has been measured to be 32% higher in the fatties than from the free ranging leanies. The leanies are also producing more saturated and trans-fats. Ohhhhh …
I
by LEE PITTS
Trick Questions
A Sex Change s an animal science graduate of California Polytechnic University (Cow Poly) at San Luis Obispo, California, I receive a newsletter called The Stock Report. In the Summer/Fall edition of 2013 there was a photo of the top seven animal science seniors. Six of them were female and an additional young lady was not pictured. There was one male! But wait, it gets worse for the men. In the scholastic achievement category (indicating they were in the top 10% of the university) I counted over 40 females and, again, one male. The token male has now replaced the token female. I also saved The Stock Report from 2011 that showed a photo of the graduating class of animal and dairy science majors for that year. It was a crowded photo so my numbers may not be exact but I counted 121 graduates, only nine of them male. As a man I am overcome with shame. Men are in decline and in the process of being reduced to “honeys, dears and darlings.” Take pity on us, please. What’s next? An equal opportunity program for men? Should the women be given their own Vet Tech major so less qualified boys have a better chance to get into cow college?
Riding Herd
Before all of this gives somebody the heebie-jeebies, though, an article from the March journal Annals of Internal Medicine may throw some cold water on all of it. The entire forced diatribe since 1961 promoting the evils of beef may wind up being not the multi-billion dollar hoax many of us have long known it to be, but more … trillions of dollars.
Educated Incapacity Futurist Herman Kahn invented the phrasing, but Ron Arnold brought it to a broader audience. Arnold, operating out of the Seattle area, used the expression describing liberal journalists who have been “taught to be blind” so they don’t have to look into major issues of our
time that run countercurrent to the standards of their liberal enclaves. Educated incapacity is their chronic ailment. They suffer from this seemingly terminal anomaly. The condition is the “learned inability to understand or even perceive a problem much less (suggest) a solution”. Daily, we are learning of the length and breadth of the cultural gyrations this malady has forced upon us. In an era that education is purported to be continuous and cutting edge, the ability to rationalize anything aside from an entrenched paradigm is largely nonexistent. Arnold used the model of Big Green to expound upon continued on page four
n the front page of our local weekly newspaper there was a photo of a cute little 4-H girl showing what was obviously a goat at a livestock show. The caption under the photo read, “Here is so and so and her SHEEP!" It’s bad enough that a journalist doesn’t know a lamb from a goat but recently a friend of mine asked me, “How many cows are there in the average feedlot?” “None,” I said. “They aren’t cows, they are steers and heifers.” He looked at me like I was the idiot. Another urban friend argued with me and insisted that “mutton” comes from old roosters that can no longer lay eggs. How did we get so stupid? I’d be willing to bet that 95 percent of the urban population couldn’t tell you the difference between a Hereford and a heifer. They think Dutch Belted is a wrestler and Porterhouse is a rapping D.J. Kids today are taking French, calculus and other subjects they’ll never use in life at the same time they are taking NO classes that might teach them anything about what they eat. And a very high percentage of people do eat! This is just wrong. I think every student to graduate from high school ought to have to take and pass a test like the this one I came up with. #1 If you bred a Blonde de Aquitane female with a Tamworth boar you’d have a) a litter of dumb blondes, b) a hog with lofty intentions, c) a miracle. #2 What is longer, a) the shelf life of Spam, b) the gestation period of a Jersey, c) the lifetime of a Southdown, d) the line to the restroom at a bad sushi joint. #3 If you put a mature bull in with some heifers for two years and never got a calf it’s probably because a) the bull was a steer, b) the heifers were spayed, c) the bull was gay. #4 If you walked behind a Jack and jabbed it in the rump with a sharp stick you, a) are dumber than a box of continued on page six
www.LeePittsbooks.com