Is all beef in Canada “antibiotic-free?”
The beef industry as a whole will argue that it is. While sustainable farmers will tell you otherwise.
Who is correct? It’s really an argument with two sides and many more implications.
Starting with Subway
In October 2015, Subway vowed that all chicken sold at its restaurants would be from antibiotic-free animals as of March 2016, with turkey and then pork and beef to follow. By 2025, the company expects its entire supply chain to be antibiotic-free.
Subway is not alone. It didn’t start with them. Fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A are simply following in the footsteps of early adopters like Chipotle and Panera by making meaningful commitments to rein in antibiotics use in their supply chains. Then there are major corporations like Perdue, Foster Farms, and Tyson that have been major drivers of change in the past year by vowing to leave routinely administered antibiotics out of their production process.
This Subway announcement in particular sent ripples of various reactions through different industries. While many health advocates applauded the move, many voices from the farming community took to social media to share their displeasure.
“Livestock get sick too.”
In our research, we found that many livestock producers argue that animals need to be healthy and well-cared if we want quality meat. Antibiotics are just a tool to this end. Professional farmers and ranchers do not use antibiotics just to use antibiotics. They only use them as needed, such as in the case of injury and to fight off bacterial infection. In fact many farmers work with veterinarians that follow careful government guidelines which approve the use of antibiotics. This adds another layer of safety. It all makes sense actually.
“Antibiotics leave the animal’s system.”
This may be the most emphatic argument from livestock producers. All approved antibiotics have a withdrawal time to leave the animal’s system. It is actually against the law to sell an animal before that time. In other word’s this supports that all meat is antibiotic-free by law.
The Other Side
The issue, according to the science and health community, is that antibiotic use is really not the issue. Antibiotic resistance is. In an article for the Washington Post, Dr. Tara Smith breaks down the arguments clearly. And she is not the only authority to do so.
Experts at the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Economic Forum are in agreement. They agree that antibiotic resistance caused by overuse of these drugs in agriculture (and humans) is one of the top public health threats in the world today. As a CDC task force reported, “We are facing the possibility of a future without effective antibiotics for some infections.” An ominous warning indeed.
For a local voice, below is a perspective Tim Hoven of Hoven Farms in Alberta. Really it is up to you as the consumer to decide. Clearly, your spending habits make a difference or else major corporations would not be making massive changes to go antibiotic free. This supports local sustainable farmers.
Read (and decide) for yourself:
Every time you use an antibiotic you make the bacteria that survive better able to resist the antibiotic next time. Every time antibiotics are used in farm production systems, evolution makes the bacteria stronger and better able to resist the antibiotics next time.
Ever hear of someone for whom antibiotics didn’t help? We have family that has died in hospital after fighting an antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria.
On our farm ‘Antibiotic Free’ means so much more than just no chemical trace of antibiotics in the food we grow. Our farm is a whole system. Everything we do on our farm is designed and planned to have healthy cattle and animals. We keep stress down to a minimum for the cattle, and we want to keep our farm as close to nature as possible.
We try to minimize the opportunities for disease. We feed only the best food we can grow to our animals. We mimic nature as much as possible on our farm to build up all the natural systems that exist, including animal immunity and health. It is our hope that by keeping our production practices as close to nature as possible, we can reduce and almost eliminate the need for antibiotics on our farm.
That is what I mean when I say our farm is antibiotic free.
When an animal is sick and requires antibiotics, we treat the animal. It would be inhumane not to treat it. But everything we try to do on the farm leads us away from disease in our animals and leads us towards good health.
Have any questions? Leave a comment below.