Cattle Implanting Procedure and Education

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- One of the biggest things I've learned with implanting is, implanting has to work with your feeding program.

I'm not saying you can take what I implant with today to your farm and make it work.

Everybody has to find that right niche that works for them.

- USDA, the FDA has to come in and say, "This product works, it does what it's supposed to do." So before implants could ever even be used in cattle, FDA had to come in and say, "They actually work, they make a difference, "they improve beef cattle production." - In cattle that are not implanted as opposed to cattle that are implanted, it's gonna take you at least 30 days longer to get those cattle finished.

There's a definite economic advantage.

You know, not only in feed efficiency, and in less days on feed.

- So when you think about technologies like growth implants, those are technologies that for every unit of feed that cattle consume, it's gonna increase the amount of lean muscle mass that those animals gain.

So that's really important from a sustainability perspective, from an environmental-sustainability perspective, because that means that it doesn't take as many resources to produce beef.

So, the things that you do as a producer to become more efficient, have a lot of environmental benefits as well.

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- Every living creature today has hormones in it, it has estrogen.

When you're talking about an implanted animal versus a non-implanted animal, the nanograms of extra estrogen is so small.

So, when you look at the research and compare it to other food products, serving up beef from an implanted steer is as safe as anything.

- So for example, there's been an analysis done looking at what would happen if the United States got rid of all of it's growth implants, it would take about 10% more feed, to produce beef in the United States.

So, again it's not about being afraid of these different products, but just recognizing that beef has a tremendous story to tell.

We're able to take forage resources that we can't use and convert it into a high quality product.

And so we just need to emphasize the positive story that is beef.

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- My brother and I have been farming since '83, and we've been implanting cattle ever since we've been farming and our dad implanted cattle before that.

The reason we implant is for gains, feed efficiency, and it's a safe product to use.

There is no withdraw on any implants, there's no withdraw to consumers.

Just listening to extension agents and the research is there to back that implanting is safe.

To me that's saying it right there.

That there's not enough of what you're putting in there that's gonna get into the meat.

The footprint that we're leaving today, is a smaller one because we're not consuming as much feed to get the cattle finished at a earlier stage.

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