Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
The Abstinence Method
Dutch farmers just say no to antibiotics for livestock.
By Maryn McKenna
To American eyes, the Hoeve de Hulsdonk farm, outside the small town of Beers in the southeastern Netherlands, looks like some radical exercise in farming transparency. There’s a bike trail to lure you onto the property, and picnic tables to keep you there. The dark metal barn, towering two stories above the farmhouse and tractors, has huge horizontal windows punched into its sides. And if you’d like a better view of the more than 17,000 pigs raised there each year, you can climb stairs to a public viewing parlor, and look down on the hogs from above.
All this because owner Gerbert Oosterlaken believes the more you can see, the better.
Along with every other livestock producer in the Netherlands, Oosterlaken is in the midst of a high-stakes, government-mandated experiment: Can large-scale meat production succeed without routine use of antibiotics?
(.............)
Antibiotics have been a crucial (and controversial) component of meat production for decades. In the late 1940s, biologists inadvertently discovered that feeding livestock tetracycline made the animals grow faster and from that revelation, an industry was born. Today, food-producing animals raised and eaten in the United States receive almost 30 million pounds of antibiotics per year. That’s several times what our country’s 300 million humans take and, unlike humans, animals receive antibiotics when they are not sick.
Most of those 30 million pounds are given to pigs, chickens and cattle in small doses every day, for growth promotion and disease prevention — that is, to fatten them and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised.
This routine drugging has been debated almost since farmers began doing it in the 1950s. The doses given to livestock to promote growth or prevent disease are smaller than the amount it would take to cure sick animals; they kill only the weak bacteria, letting stronger, drug-resistant ones survive and spread. British scientists began detecting a spike in antibiotic-resistant infections in humans in the 1960s, and in 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tried to ban some routine animal dosing, blaming it for increasing amounts of antibiotic resistance. Since then, hundreds of scientific studies have traced a link between antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic-resistant bacteria on farms and in the outside world.
At the same time, antibiotic-resistant human illnesses have been worsening around the world, producing what the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “nightmare bacteria” that cannot be treated by traditional methods.
So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
Large-scale agriculture proponents reject any link between farms and human health problems. In publications and testimony, spokespeople for conventional meat production have said that taking away antibiotics would cut productivity and raise costs.
But the Netherlands’ success demonstrates this isn’t true. The country is tiny, but its livestock-raising is intensive and high-tech: 17 million people and about 118 million farm animals share a space only the size of Maryland, yet the Netherlands is Europe’s leading meat exporter. So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
Read more: Modern Farmer
Dutch farmers just say no to antibiotics for livestock.
By Maryn McKenna
To American eyes, the Hoeve de Hulsdonk farm, outside the small town of Beers in the southeastern Netherlands, looks like some radical exercise in farming transparency. There’s a bike trail to lure you onto the property, and picnic tables to keep you there. The dark metal barn, towering two stories above the farmhouse and tractors, has huge horizontal windows punched into its sides. And if you’d like a better view of the more than 17,000 pigs raised there each year, you can climb stairs to a public viewing parlor, and look down on the hogs from above.
All this because owner Gerbert Oosterlaken believes the more you can see, the better.
Along with every other livestock producer in the Netherlands, Oosterlaken is in the midst of a high-stakes, government-mandated experiment: Can large-scale meat production succeed without routine use of antibiotics?
(.............)
Antibiotics have been a crucial (and controversial) component of meat production for decades. In the late 1940s, biologists inadvertently discovered that feeding livestock tetracycline made the animals grow faster and from that revelation, an industry was born. Today, food-producing animals raised and eaten in the United States receive almost 30 million pounds of antibiotics per year. That’s several times what our country’s 300 million humans take and, unlike humans, animals receive antibiotics when they are not sick.
Most of those 30 million pounds are given to pigs, chickens and cattle in small doses every day, for growth promotion and disease prevention — that is, to fatten them and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised.
This routine drugging has been debated almost since farmers began doing it in the 1950s. The doses given to livestock to promote growth or prevent disease are smaller than the amount it would take to cure sick animals; they kill only the weak bacteria, letting stronger, drug-resistant ones survive and spread. British scientists began detecting a spike in antibiotic-resistant infections in humans in the 1960s, and in 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tried to ban some routine animal dosing, blaming it for increasing amounts of antibiotic resistance. Since then, hundreds of scientific studies have traced a link between antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic-resistant bacteria on farms and in the outside world.
At the same time, antibiotic-resistant human illnesses have been worsening around the world, producing what the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls “nightmare bacteria” that cannot be treated by traditional methods.
So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
Large-scale agriculture proponents reject any link between farms and human health problems. In publications and testimony, spokespeople for conventional meat production have said that taking away antibiotics would cut productivity and raise costs.
But the Netherlands’ success demonstrates this isn’t true. The country is tiny, but its livestock-raising is intensive and high-tech: 17 million people and about 118 million farm animals share a space only the size of Maryland, yet the Netherlands is Europe’s leading meat exporter. So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
Read more: Modern Farmer