Junkfood diet for pigs

[Pareski do]

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5952340#ixzz24IrUoj00

Sky-high corn means hogs get candy
Ethanol-juiced corn prices mean livestock producers are turning to waste cocoa, grape skins, surplus spuds and Kit Kat bar trimmings.
Posted:   05/22/2007 01:00:00 AM MDT
By Lauren Etter
The Wall Street Journal

When Alfred Smith's hogs eat trail mix, they usually shun the Brazil nuts.

"Pigs can be picky eaters," Smith says, scooping a handful of banana chips, yogurt-covered raisins, dried papaya and cashews from one of the 12 one-ton boxes in his shed. Generally, he says, "they like the sweet stuff."

Smith is just happy his pigs aren't eating him out of house and home. Growing demand for corn-based ethanol, a biofuel that has surged in popularity over the past year, has pushed up the price of corn, Smith's main feed, to near-record levels. Because feed represents farms' biggest single cost in raising animals, farmers are serving them a lot of people food, because it can be cheaper.

In Colorado, Ken Ulrich is mixing stale potato chips, outdated flour, sunflower hulls and sometimes even beer into the food he serves the 8,000 cattle eating meals at his Platteville feedlot.

"Historically we've fed them either corn and silage or corn and hay," Ulrich said. Products left over from making people food have always been added when it was available - things like whey from a tofu manufacturer and potato peelings from off a snack food maker's floor.

"Since the price of corn has gone so high, we've done it more."

The menu at Ulrich Farms is now about half traditional corn and hay, half fruit punch, tortillas and beermakers' yeast. The cattle don't seem to mind.

"We feed them anything," he said. "Somebody said ABC, anything but corn."

Besides trail mix, pigs and cattle throughout the country are downing cookies, licorice, cheese curls, candy bars, French fries, frosted wheat cereal and peanut-butter cups. Some farmers mix chocolate powder with cereal and feed it to baby pigs.

"It's kind of like getting Cocoa Puffs," says David Funderburke, a livestock nutritionist at Cape Fear Consulting in Warsaw, N.C., who helps Smith and other farmers formulate healthy diets for livestock.

California farmers are feeding farm animals grape skins from vineyards and lemon pulp from citrus groves. Cattle ranchers in spud-rich Idaho are buying truckloads of uncooked French fries, Tater Tots and hash browns.

"It's kind of funny," said Cevin Jones of Intermountain Beef in Idaho. "Every once in a while, you can spot a couple of cattle fighting over a whole potato."

In Pennsylvania, farmers are turning to candy bars and snack foods because of the many food manufacturers nearby. Hershey Co. sells farmers waste cocoa and the trimmings from wafers that go into its Kit Kat bars.

At Nissin Foods, maker of Top Ramen and Cup Noodles, farmers drive to a Lancaster, Pa., factory and load up on scraps of the squiggly dried noodles, which pile up in bins beneath the assembly line.

Historically, the livestock industry has consumed 60 percent of the nation's corn crop. Thanks to the ethanol rush, the price of a bushel of corn for months has hovered around $4 - nearly double the price of a few years ago.

Smith began feeding his hogs trail mix about a year ago, after Funderburke told him a local manufacturer was looking to dump surplus mix that was either too salty, sprinkled with cardboard or otherwise unfit for human consumption.

"I've heard no complaints," he said.

Denver Post assistant business editor Linda Castrone contributed to this report.

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