Living Without Plastic

  • Cheryl Lohrman victorious after finding a specialty deli that would sell her cheese and put it, plastic free, in her steel tin. (Photo courtesy of Sadie Babits)

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

Transcript

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

When Cheryl Lohrmann comes to the grocery store all she sees is plastic. Plastic yogurt containers, cheese wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap, juice bottles, plastic bags. She doesn’t want this stuff in her life. So Lohrmann decided she’d vote with her wallet by refusing to buy anything with plastic.

“We’re at cherry sprouts grocery store in Portland, OR where I’m going to purchase some cheese and some eggs.”

Eggs are no problem. She just puts them in her used egg carton. But cheese is a different story. She has a small steel tin that looks like it belongs with her camping gear – not the grocery store. And Lohrmann has a special request for the guy behind the counter.

“And that is if I get the cheese not wrapped up in plastic but just in this container or maybe you could put this on paper.”

“Aahhh. I don’t think we can do that because it needs to be wrapped up.”

Lohrmann gets that reaction a lot. So she won’t buy cheese here. It means a trip to another shop – this time a high-end specialty deli.

LouAnne Schooler owns this store. She explains to Lohrmann why they use plastic.

“Plastic, it’s the unfortunately simplest choice because we wrap and re-wrap continuously throughout the day and it can’t be left unwrapped and people need to see the cheese so that precludes it from being wrapped in most papers.”

But Schooler says she’s only too happy to help people like Lohrmann who don’t want their cheese shrink- wraped. So she drops the cheese –plastic free – into Lohrmann’s tin.

“That’s a good chunk of cheese. Magical moment here–thanks for letting me do that”

“Sure.”

Lohrmann started going plastic free a couple of years ago after reading Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbageland. The author tracked her trash to find out where it ended up. The chapter on plastic struck a nerve with Lohrmann.

“I think it’s been taken too far when you have toothpicks individually wrapped in plastic. You know you just start to think is that really necessary given the fact that this is such a toxic material that doesn’t have high enough recycling rights to really justify having it.”

Lohrmann also gets miffed that you end up paying for plastic three times. You pay for it at the grocery store and again to have it hauled to the landfill. Finally, she says we pay for it environmentally – plastic doesn’t disappear. So you might think it’s a little nuts to even think about living a life free of plastic. Lohrmann gets that.

“It is hard right now to feel like you can maneuver to get whatever you want without plastic.”

“Ok, so on a scale of one to ten–ten being plastic free–where are you?”

“I would say probably a nine.”

That’s a nine when it comes to buying groceries. Because let’s face it. Plastic is everywhere even in Lohrmann’s home. There’s her computer, picture frames, even the parts on her bike. She realizes going plastic free is nearly impossible but she’s willing to try to send a message especially to businesses that we need to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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America’s Food Waste

  • It takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that ends up being wasted. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Government researchers recently put out a study that says American’s throw away forty percent of their food. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Americans waste a lot of food – by some estimates, almost half of the total amount in the food supply. Samara Freemark reports that the problem goes way beyond cleaning your plate.

A couple of months ago, government researchers put out a study that said Americans waste 40% of their food.

When I read that figure, it seemed incredibly high. So high that when I sat down with a food policy expert, I was actually a little embarrassed to ask her about it.

“I saw this number, 40%. Is that possible? It seems high to me.”

“I think the wasting of 40% of food, I actually think that could be a low number.”

That’s Jennifer Berg. She’s the director of the graduate program in food studies at New York University, and she spends a lot of time thinking about the food waste problem – in particular, about its huge environmental impacts.

It turns out, it takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that eventually ends up in the garbage. It takes a lot of fuel to move that food around; packaging it takes plastic and paper, and throwing it away fills up landfills.

“There’s that old, you know ‘an orange peel…’ An orange peel takes years to break down. You know, a banana peel, half a loaf of bread. All that stuff goes into landfills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s organic matter or not. It doesn’t decompose. It doesn’t break down, when it’s all put together like that.”

Berg says Americans get plenty of messages about cleaning their plates.

But they don’t necessarily understand how much food gets wasted before it even makes it to the table.

“If you think about meat. Other countries, they will consume 85% of a cow. We will consume 30%. 20%. We only eat very specific cuts. We want our food totally filleted, we want it boned. We just eat very very specific food.”

I wanted to see what a waste-free meal looked like, so I took a trip to EN Japanese brasserie in Manhattan.

For the past couple of months, EN Brasserie has hosted special dinners where customers pay good money to eat the kinds of things most Americans throw away.

Reika Alexander owns the restaurant. She came up with the idea for the dinners when she moved to New York and saw how much food people in the city threw out.

“I realized that New Yorkers create so much garbage. When I saw that my heart was really aching. We have to do something about that.”

Alexander showed me some of the food she’d be serving that night. The first thing she handed me was a plate of fried eel backbones.

“We import live eels. So we get the whole thing. So we deep fry the bone part. It’s like a really flavorful rice cracker. Want to try. You just eat it? Like the bone? The whole bone? It’s good, right? It’s really good. The bones just fall apart in your mouth.”

There was a platter of rice topped with scraps of fish and vegetable trimmings. A salad made from salmon skin. And a cauldron of soup with whole fish heads bobbing in the broth.

“The eye, it’s so flavorful and delicious. The fish eyes have so much flavor. It makes a beautiful fish stock.”

At the dinner that night I asked college student Cordelia Blanchard what she was eating.

“I don’t know. I think the idea is that what’s left over the chefs just throw in a pot, and that’s what we have the pleasure of eating tonight. It makes me want to be more creative about how I combine what’s left in the kitchen sink.”

Which is the kind of attitude that restaurant owner Reika Alexander likes. Still, she says, she doesn’t expect the average American to sit down to a dinner of eel bones and fish eyes any time soon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark

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Time to Eat the Dog?

  • Meredith Mull loves dogs. She owns five and works as a groomer. She's not getting rid of any of her pets to help the environment. (Photo by Julie Grant)

We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:

Transcript

We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:

Robert Vale is sorry. He didn’t set out to incriminate Fido. He and his wife Brenda Vale specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University in New Zealand. And they just wanted to see how much of the world’s resources it takes to do things like eat, work, play sports, and own pets.

“The thing that most surprised us, and was the most unexpected was the scale of the impact of pets – which was really, really high.”

Vale says a big dog, like a German Shepard, actually has a bigger ecological footprint than an SUV.

To measure the ecological paw-print of pets, the Vales looked at the ingredients in common brands of dried pet foods. Based on recommended portion sizes, they calculated that a medium sized dog would consume more than 3 ounces of dried meat a day. To get that much dried meat, the Vales found, it takes nearly a pound of fresh meat. Add that up each day, and they concluded a medium sized dog eats about 360 pounds of meat a year!

Robert Vale says raising that meat – beef, lamb and chicken – has an environmental impact.

“And we did the calculation based on a dog eating chicken, which is a fairly low footprint meat, rather than say beef, which is a fairly high footprint meat. So, we tried to bias it in favor of the dog. But it still came out really big. It was a big surprise, really.”

Vale says the dog takes more than 2 and a half times more energy and resources than building and driving an SUV 6000 miles a year.

These numbers aren’t just coming from the Vales.
The New Scientist Magazine asked the Stockholm Environment Institute in England to calculate a dog’s paw-print, and the findings were almost exactly the same.

But none of this really computes with dog-lover Meredith Mull. She doesn’t understand why Robert Vale would even look into this.

“He must not have a pet. He must not know what it’s like to be loved by an animal and take care of it and have it give you nothing but respect and loyalty and love. He must not know what it feels like.”

The Vales don’t have any pets. They used to have cats and other animals. But when they died, Robert Vale says they felt they shouldn’t replace them and use more of the world’s resources just to give themselves a little more comfort.

“We are increasingly pushing up to a question of limits. What can we have, what, everything. I think to some extent, that’s why it’s unpopular. We’ve all been brought up to believe that not only can we have more of everything, but it’s our right to have more of everything.”

But some people think the Vales are barking up the wrong tree.

Chetana Mirle works on global warming issues at the Humane Society of the United States. She says instead of blaming dogs, people should look at what they, themselves are eating – and how that contributes to environmental problems.

“So to me, I felt like, ‘are you kidding me?’ Um, we’re worried about our pets, and what our pets are eating instead of what we’re eating, and what our consumption is about – which has such a huge disproportionately large impact on climate change and the environment in general.”

It’s not that the researchers want people to blame dogs and cats instead of themselves. They say they just want people to understand that each choice we make – right down to whether we have pets – has an environmental impact.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Chicken Surprise at Stores

  • Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores to test for their study. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:

Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores.

Dr. Urvashi Rangan says they tested them for two different strains of bacteria.

“Salmonella and campylobacter infections can give people serious diarhea, abdominal cramping for sometimes days, even weeks at a time.”

Two-thirds of the chickens they tested were tainted.

Rangan says the U.S. government’s guidelines are pretty loose for the chicken processors.

“Each company is basically allowed to script their own hygeine plan. And, clearly, there aren’t enough standards or standardidization among them that has allowed them to achieve a decent rate of cleanliness.”

The chickens that were cleanest were organic air-chilled chickens. The Consumer Report’s study is available online and will be published in the January issue of the magazine.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Not the Colonel’s Drive-Thru

  • Economists say locally produced chicken can be pricey because there's not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:

Transcript

There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:

One idea’s to bring the slaughterhouse to the chicken farm.

The Whole Foods grocery chain could try out small, mobile slaughtering units next year. It might help Whole Foods offer more locally-raised chicken at its stores, but no one’s sure whether it will work.

Economists say the slaughterhouse pinch is a problem for consumers.

Wes Jarrell studies farm markets for the University of Illinois. He says locally produced chicken can be pricey because there’s not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business.

“In order for that farmer to stay in business, they have to charge more and we would certainly like to lower that price to make it available to more people.”

Jarrell says Whole Foods is not the only group to consider mobile chicken slaughterhouses. He says a few state governments, like Vermont’s, are revving up their own portable slaughterhouses, too.


For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Part 4: Hunters Warned After Dioxin Delays

  • Fish advisories dot the banks of the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers. Various forms or pollution, including historical dioxin pollution from Dow Chemical, have led to warnings to avoid certain species of fish and limit consumption for them. Pregnant woment and young children are given more stringent warnings. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

It’s deer season in Michigan, and
hunters are trekking through the woods,
trying to bag dinner or something
special for the holidays. Hunting’s
gotten a little complicated in some
areas recently. Just because you catch
something doesn’t mean you should eat
it. That’s because a stretch of river
in Michigan was polluted with dioxin –
decades ago. In the fourth part of a
series on Dow Chemical and dioxin, Shawn
Allee found the state thinks
old dioxin pollution from a Dow chemical
plant poses a health risk today:

Transcript

It’s deer season in Michigan, and
hunters are trekking through the woods,
trying to bag dinner or something
special for the holidays. Hunting’s
gotten a little complicated in some
areas recently. Just because you catch
something doesn’t mean you should eat
it. That’s because a stretch of river
in Michigan was polluted with dioxin –
decades ago. In the fourth part of a
series on Dow Chemical and dioxin, Shawn
Allee found the state thinks
old dioxin pollution from a Dow chemical
plant poses a health risk today:

It was hard for me to understand why wild game like deer or turkey might be contaminated from river pollution, so I hit up Daniel O’Brien for some answers. O’Brien’s a toxicologist with Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources. He says the problem starts with dioxin in the river.

“It’s in the sediments in these contaminated parts of the Tittabawassee River, and after flood events in the spring when, say, mud in the river gets deposited onto bushes or whatever and deer browse those, then they pick up soil that way.”

Part of O’Brien’s job is to spread the news about the contamination. He says when you buy a hunting license in Michigan you get this brochure.

“It’s a booklet that has all the regulations for hunting and trapping in it.”

These wildlife consumption advisories are voluntary but they kinda read like owners manuals. They lay out where the dioxin-contaminated animals are. They tell you what animals you can eat, and what parts. For example, no one’s supposed to eat deer liver from the areas – that’s got the most dioxin in it. And, of cuts you can eat, the advisory says how much, and how often. Plus, they tell who should eat less or maybe none at all.

“Kids might be more sensitive. They might have a more stringent advisory than somebody like me who’s kinda your middle-aged man and we might not be as susceptible to toxic effects.”


The idea’s to protect people from dioxin, and the risk it poses for cancer and diseases of the immune, reproductive, and developmental systems. It’s an important job, given how big hunting is in Michigan.

“We have three quarters of a million hunters every year that go afield and harvest half a million white-tailed deer.”

Michigan scientists take the issue seriously, but I’m kinda curious whether hunters do. So, I visit the Saginaw Field and Stream Club. Inside, there’s this paneled wall with faded pictures of club presidents. It stretches from the club’s founding in 1916 – all the way to this guy, current President Tom Heritier.

“We’re still here today.”

Heritier says his club’s smack-dab in the contaminated area and everyone knows about the advisories, but, well …

“With the game advisories, I have not heard one person who has any problem with the deer or the birds around the watershed.”

This goes for him, too.

“Nobody is sick from it. I don’t know of anybody that has died of exposure. That’s never been proven. It’s nothing to take lightly, but then again, it might be a little bit on the overblown side, too.”

The State of Michigan tried to survey hunters like Heritier. Officials wanted to know if hunters were feeding tainted game to young children. That survey never made the budget.

Before I leave the hunting club, Heritier wants to clear something up. He’s actually mad about dioxin. It’s in the environment – he wants it gone.

Heritier: “There’s absolutely no reason for industry to be polluting our natural resources, whether it be air, soil, or water.”

Allee: “Even if it’s not a slam-dunk, for sure, killing people off sort of thing?”

Heritier: “Number one, God didn’t put it there, it don’t belong there. That’s the way it is.”

Well, Heritier wants the environment protected from dioxin, but not necessarily himself.

State scientists say, if Heritier changes his mind and wants to reduce his health risk – they’ll keep printing those game advisories for him.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Pharmaceuticals Down on the Farm

Congress is looking at restricting antibiotic use on livestock farms. The drugs are added to the animals’ feed to help stop diseases. Antibiotics also make the animals grow faster, and that’s good for farmer’s profits. Mark Brush reports… public health officials are concerned:

Transcript

Congress is looking at restricting antibiotic use on livestock farms. The drugs are added to the animals’ feed to help stop diseases. Antibiotics also make the animals grow faster, and that’s good for farmer’s profits. Mark Brush reports… public health officials are concerned:

A lot of researchers say overuse of antibiotics on farms can lead to bacteria that are resistant to the drugs.

A bill in Congress would stop the drugs from being used to promote growth… and just use them to treat sick animals. The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act is sponsored by the only micro-biologist in Congress. Representative Louise Slaughter from New York:

“And we’re watching a whole new classification now of bacteria, which was basically just a cut above harmless, become deadly. Particulary Staphylococcus aureus, which was as common as dirt, but now is MRSA. And can kill you in twenty-four hours.”

Slaughter says the Food and Drug Administration is not doing enough. So Congress has to step in.

The livestock industry says current regulations are enough.

For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Organic Meat Hard to Find

  • Organic steak is hard to find, partly because so few slaughterhouses are certified organic. (Photo by David Benbennick, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef. It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices. But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.
Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:

Transcript

Organic farmers would love to have you dig into more of their pork, chicken and beef.

It’s not just because they’re proud about how they raise their animals – it’s because certified organic meat fetches high prices.

But organic meat is harder to find than you’d expect, and it’s partly because there are few organically-certified slaughterhouses.

Shawn Allee found a farming community that came up with a solution:

Dennis and Emily Wettstein turned their Illinois farm organic a while ago, mostly because conventional farming wasn’t practical for them.

“All the money seemed to go to pay for the fertilizers and the chemicals. And then I was more or less allergic to the chemicals. And so we were interested in getting away from that, especially if we were going to raise a family out here.”

The Wettsteins didn’t just raise grain organically – they kept chemicals and hormones out of their cattle.

“We started raising meat for ourselves and our families. Then, pretty soon, just word of mouth, friends and neighbors wanted meat.”

And, they found people who’d pay top dollar for their meat.

“We sell at the Oak Park farmers market.”

That’s just west of Chicago.

“Right. The Oak Park market managers, they are working on all the farmers to go towards organic.”

And that worked for the Wettsteins – they had USDA certified organic chicken.

“There’s one other meat vendor there – it’s not organic. So, we have no competition. We feel that, with that label on there, we can set our price to where we can make a profit.”

But Emily Wettstein says that term – organic – gave them trouble when it came to beef and other meat.

“We were getting a little bit pressured from other people, ‘Well, you can’t call your item organic. You don’t have a processing facility with the term of certified organic.'”

Here was the problem: For meat to get labeled USDA certified organic, it’s gotta be certified from the farm to the slaughterhouse.

The Wettsteins had someone to process organic chicken, but they were out of luck with pigs and cows.

There was no certified slaughterhouse for beef or pork in Illinois.

So, the Wettsteins and some relatives prodded meat lockers to get certified.
There was one taker.

“I’m inside a meat locker that’s about a fifteen minute drive from the Wettstein farm. It’s owned by Scott Bittner, and I’m here to understand what organic certification means for his business. How do I put this, there’s a headless, hoofless, skinless cow hanging from your ceiling. Where are we exactly?”

We’re on the kill floor. We had seventeen, eighteen cattle today. Seven of those were organic.

So, walk me through how you have to treat that organic cow differently.

It’s the first thing we did this morning – that’s one thing. Other than that, it’s segregating it in the cooler from the non-organic product and then processing it at a later time, which, again, you have to do first thing in the morning.

So, the basic idea is segregation?

Yeah, it is. The whole way through. Exactly.

Bittner’s simplifying things, but not much.

He has to clean or swap equipment between batches of organic and conventional meat.

There are rules on the kinds of chemicals he can use. And he hires a certification company to monitor his paper work.

Bittner says overall, it’s easy, and he’s surprised more slaughterhouses haven’t done it.

“Here we’re doing all our fabricating – grinding sausage, ground beef. Cutting some chops, ribs.”

“How does it feel to be the only guy who can process an organic side of beef?”

“I want to keep it quiet – I don’t want too many people to get started doing what I’m doing because it’s nice. I get two or three customers every year that I didn’t have before. When you go to bed at night and think about this economy being the way it is, every little bit helps.”

Bittner says farmers drive animals up to four hours to slaughter their animals here.

He says he’s proud of his work but can’t take too much credit; he knows he’s got a local organic slaughtering monopoly going.

That might change some day, but for now it’s reason enough to keep his knives sharp.

For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Lead Bullets and Hunters’ Meat

  • Condors are harmed by eating meat contaminated with lead from hunters' bullets (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Hunters have been using lead
bullets for decades to kill game with
little, if any, side effects. But new
research finds that hunters may need
to use more caution when choosing their
bullets. Reporter Sadie Babits has this
story on a hidden danger that’s just
coming to light:

Transcript

Hunters have been using lead
bullets for decades to kill game with
little, if any, side effects. But new
research finds that hunters may need
to use more caution when choosing their
bullets. Reporter Sadie Babits has this
story on a hidden danger that’s just
coming to light:

Tony Hanson has been hunting wild game all of his life. And over the years, he’s
grown pretty attached to what he considers the most cost effective, most efficient
bullet around – a lead bullet.

“It matters a lot to a hunter. You are counting on the range of that bullet. You know
what the bullet can do and you know what the gun will do. You’re out there to take
an animals life, and that’s not something we take lightly.”

The typical bullet used by most hunters is made up of about 65% lead. The bullet is
capped off with a copper jacket. These bullets are designed to handle high speeds and
to kill an animal quickly without breaking apart and sending tiny lead fragments
throughout the meat. Hanson works with the country’s largest conservation group –
Michigan United Conservation Clubs. He says he’s not concerned about possible
lead poisoning.

“Generally speaking, if you make the shot you are supposed to make you’re not
getting any edible meat. It’s not something that really weighs into my thought too
much. ”

Like Hansen, most hunters don’t give lead bullets a second thought. So why worry?

Well, early last spring, food pantries across North Dakota and Minnesota were
advised not to give out donated ground venison. That’s after lab tests revealed tiny
lead fragments in some of the meat.

It generated enough interest that North Dakota launched a study involving some 700
people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked with North
Dakota’s Health Department. They found that people who ate a lot of wild game
tended to have higher lead levels in their blood than those who ate very little or no
wild game.

The results validated similar research involving California Condors. The Condors
almost went extinct in large part because of lead poisoning. You see, the birds would
feed on gut piles and carcasses left by hunters, and, if those hunters used lead bullets,
the condors would get sick.

That old problem still exists. Lead poisoning remains the number one obstacle
standing in the way of restoring the California Condors.

(sound of birds outdoors)

Rick Watson is the vice president of the Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. He says
they’ve tracked the birds through satellites to see what they feed on. They’ve also
shot deer in the same way a hunter would, using typical lead bullets. The animals
were then x-rayed.

“And we were astounded by the results. Typically out of the 30 or so deer all of them
had fragmented lead bullets in them. And we were also amazed about the actual
extent the lead fragments are sprayed throughout the meat.”

Watson says about 5% of a bullet does break apart and some of it gets into the meat.
He’s now working on another study to see the impact of lead bullets on people.
That’s involved shooting more deer, sending the meat to random processors, and
then running that meat through an x-ray machine. The findings, he says support
what North Dakota discovered late last fall.

“And again what we found that 30% of the packages of meat that came back had at
least one fragment of lead in them.”

Not enough to make a person sick, but enough to raise a red flag. Watson says the
solution is simple. Hunters need to use non-toxic lead bullets. But most hunters
aren’t convinced. So-called green bullets are about twice the cost of lead bullets and
hunters don’t believe they are as efficient.

Hunters say they want independent research done before anybody starts making the
switch to non toxic bullets.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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Honey, I Shrunk the Cow

  • Today’s cattle are much bigger than they were back in the 1920s. They’ve been bred to big and beefy. But, it turns out, you can actually produce more meat with the smaller cattle. (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)

Because of feed and energy prices,
some cattle farmers are scaling back.
They’re not reducing the size of their
herd. They’re reducing the size of their
cows. Kinna Ohman reports:

Transcript

Because of feed and energy prices,
some cattle farmers are scaling back.
They’re not reducing the size of their
herd. They’re reducing the size of their
cows. Kinna Ohman reports:

Today’s cattle are much bigger than they were back in the 1920s. They’ve been bred to
big and beefy. But, it turns out, you can actually produce more meat with the smaller
cattle.

Richard Gradwohl has been breeding miniature cattle for more than forty years. He
says with today’s larger beef cattle on five acres, you can produce 2400 pounds of
meat. He can raise as much as 7000 pounds of beef on that same five acres.

“It’s surprising to me how many large cattle breeders call me almost every day
because they’re interested in reducing the size of their animals to achieve more
feed efficiency.”

Gradwohl thinks the emphasis on breeding large cattle might be reversing.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kinna Ohman.

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