15 thoughts on “Every Acre Made By Hand”

      1. Lan

        Imagine PETA and the most loony members of Greenpeace got together and had a baby that they kept in the dark feeding it only on exaggeration and deliberately misrepresented statistics. Then that baby took a big steaming dump and filmed it before uploading it to Netflix

        There you go, saved you 2 hours or however long that rubbish is

    2. Disasta

      I think the US approach is different. To be fair.
      That doc movie “Home” show the cattle farms over there from above.
      Horrible looking grass-less seas of cattle with trucks trundling around transporting unnatural feeds.

      1. Mikeyfex

        Eh but it’s called Cowspiracy and it’s on NETFLIX and he used loads of question marks and Cowspiracy is a portmanteau and so is sheeple.

        1. Dόn Pídgéόní

          Is it Fast Food Nation that also talks about the final few months of cows that make up hamsburgers? It’s bad.

          1. Lan

            Most of those docs show a very fantastical aspect of farming. Extreme and rarely based on reality.

            Cows for burgers are older, not normally as fit as younger stock but still covered by welfare regulations. And it doesn’t improve profit to abuse your stock. They cost money, losing them wastes that money

          2. Dόn Pídgéόní

            Dude, you’re preaching to a farmer’s kid. But the beef industry in the US was pretty messed up, though they have been forced to change things now. Its more about how completely out of touch people are with where their food comes from and how it might have lived.

      3. Lan

        Ok it’s always weird when I have to do this but….

        Yes Irish ag is very different, ours uses lots more grass and outdoor systems but say US beef is similar for the first year of the calves. They’re normally reared on extensive ranges with cows feeding them. It’s not disimilar to the extensive high nature value in the west of Ireland

        After than it gets different. Cos they have a good climate for corn but not great for grass they’ll normally put them into outdoor feed lots and feed them high cereal diets (but it’s not all, their diets include forages and food byproducts like straw or waste vegs) whereas ours will be kept on grass. US beef finishes faster but often include things such as hormone implants we don’t have here. Irish beef is given some cereals as a boost in the last few months.

        Irish dairy and US dairy differs but you do find US dairy that seems similar to here, grass based and outdoor. Commonly though US dairies have to keep their cows in climate controlled sheds cos heat stress is a big impact on milk producers. In their good farms have a very high standard of welfare but bad farms can be very very poor. They’re not fed unnatural foods (as no modern food is truly natural – except maybe on those ranges I mentioned or west of Ireland) but a mixture of forage and cereals to optimise their production. As with welfare done right cows can do very well on a balanced diet but it’s easy to get wrong too.

        We prefer grass based cos it’s what suits Ireland best. We do have a higher standard of welfare and great traceability here too but US isn’t full of evil farmers either just different

  3. Nugget

    I’d rather sit in a car on the M50 to get a drab office in a depressing industrial estate than milk cows. That video makes it look romantic. It’s hard bloody work.

    2. Lan

      It is but it’s also really rewarding…well some times

      Personally the monotony of sitting in traffic and working at a desk for a boss would kill me. Not that it doesn’t look appealing at 3am when you’re freezing and trying to bring a calf back from the brink of death.

      Either way nice to hear someone remind people our job is hard (not psychiatric nurse or junior doctor hard but hard) and not fancy tractors and new jeeps

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