« on: October 15, 2013, 03:37:13 am »
Searching for grass-fed beef in Portugal, I stumbled into this article :
New York Times praises the quality of Uruguayan beef from grass-fed cattle
Sunday, December 20th 2009
The New York Times dedicated a long piece to the quality and rising pre-eminence of Uruguayan beef in world markets, contrary to what is happening in neighbouring Argentina, still considered “king of the best beef in the world”
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For more than a century, Argentina has distinguished its beef as healthier and more natural than meat from most of the world. Cows ambled leisurely across the rich soil of the Humid Pampa munching on green grass, not the grains offered in crowded feedlots in the faster-paced American industry.
But that image could become a memory from a bygone era. Political decisions by Argentina are changing the taste of the famed Argentine steak and threatening to tarnish the country’s world-renowned beef industry.
The changes have driven away investors, reduced the size of Argentina’s herd and given the nation’s smaller neighbour, Uruguay, the chance to capitalize on Argentina’s troubles by billing itself as the “last big farm” for healthier, grass-fed cattle
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But faced with a prolonged drought this year and concerns over their profits, many ranchers are converting their pastures into land for soybean cultivation. Now government incentives to fatten cattle faster are deepening a shift toward raising more Argentine beef with grains like corn and oats in often-crowded feedlots, opening the door for Uruguay to claim the grass-fed advantage.
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Uruguay is trying to show the world it is dedicated to “natural” beef — grass-fed and hormone-free by law. One marketing campaign features a symbol of a supermarket bar code emerging from blades of grass. Another points out that each Uruguayan cow, on average, grazes on pasture the size of two soccer fields
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Logged
Cause and effect are distant in time and space in complex systems, while at the same time there’s a tendency to look for causes near the events sought to be explained. Time delays in feedback in systems result in the condition where the long-run response of a system to an action is often different from its short-run response. — Ronald J. Ziegler
