Antibiotic Misuse and Our Soil

Did you know that 70% of antibiotics used in the US are used on livestock?

And while most of those animals are kept in terrible conditions and fed unnatural (for them) food, they're mostly administered to promote rapid growth. So that nothing impedes animals like cows getting huge off of corn, which is like raising a human being on an all-donuts, all-the-time diet. A donut here and there isn't that bad, but can you imagine how sick you'd feel if that was all you had to eat for every meal?

Then we feed the obese, sick cows to people, and lo and behold, a steady diet of that makes people feel pretty sick.

Do those antibiotics even keep pathogens out of the food supply? No. Some bacteria have learned to survive the onslaught. In fact, as they reviewed in Food, Inc., because the confinement feedlot cows are standing ankle deep in each other's manure all the time, the apparently resistant and acid-tolerant E. coli strain O157:H7 spreads among them rapidly, living happily in their highly acid stomachs filled with corn (aka, donuts-for-cows.)

So we waste antibiotics on intentionally raising sick animals and cultivating antibiotic-resistance in strains of infectious bacteria that are very dangerous to us. These actions directly make us more unhealthy in every way.

Organic composting techniques can be used to get rid of this O157:H7 strain of E. coli after the fact, but why have so much of it, anyway? Why not give them native grass pasture in the first place, and skip the antibiotics?

Repeated scientific findings indicate that these antibiotic cocktails as passed along in manure are harmful to beneficial soil bacteria, especially the kind that naturally take nitrogen from the air and turn it into plant fertilizer. That sounds like a disaster all through the food chain, which depends heavily on the availability of nitrogen originating from bacteria.

And as previously blogged here, though it bears repeating, these antibiotics can be taken up into crop plants when uncomposted, antibiotic-contaminated manure is used as a fertilizer. Then people eat the antibiotic-contaminated plants, especially the minimally processed ones, and then we get the unneeded, unmonitored, random administration of drugs that should really only be dispensed when clearly required.

Leave it to the factory farming industry to take two extremely useful things, antibiotics and animal dung, and turn them both into major public health and environmental hazards.

(Photo credit: IamSAM on Flickr.)