The title country bumkin suits me just fine. I don’t have a college education or claim to know everything. I would rather work with cows as I had people. They don’t kill each other or complain too much.
My home is not as large as Mr. Carlberg’s so it would not hold very many of my cows. I don’t think they would like it anyway. I don’t think I could house break them anyway.
I stand in manure, had it from head to toe and it hasn’t hurt me yet.
A friend and I went to a feedlot in the panhandle of Texas where they had 77 head. My friend lost one for a death loss rate of 2.3 percent. We saw these cattle in the pen from the alleyway. They were not tightly packed or poor. They seemed quite content and fat. Yes they laid on and stood on manure (not mud) that was tightly packed and mounded higher in the middle so the water would run off.
It’s amazing Mr. Carlberg mentioned Hereford, Texas. I lived there nine months. When I was there, there were three feedlots. Deaf Smith County is a farming and feedlot county, not a tourist attraction. Why anyone would drive through Hereford I don’t know. The area is dry, not humid. It can snow four inches one day, melt the next, and the ground will be dry. Did Mr. Carlberg see any lush green lawns? Most lawns I saw were small and chat or rock. Most farmers live in town because of the dust. I suggest Mr. Carlberg go back to Hereford, Texas, go to a feedlot, ask questions, talk to the people who work there, and see for himself how much room these cattle have from the alley not the highway.
A cattle producer a few miles from me lost a heifer and had others ill due to “dust pneumonia” a few years ago. So it does happen in pasture cattle right here in Seminole County.
Miles and miles of feedlots? Self explainatory, supply meets the demand. People from Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, and South Korea want grain fed beef from the United States. How many thousands of square miles of pasture and years would it take to grass feed the same amount of cattle? We are losing farm land every day to urban sprawl and development.
David Post,
Seminole
