You are what you eat...

[TrekkiePiggies]

And if you eat beef or milk, you're eating chicken manure.

Yup, somebody found out that you can feed cattle broiler-house litter, which is made up of litter (bedding--usually rice hulls here in CA), chicken feces, spilled food, feathers, and all the interesting fungi and bacteria that have proliferated during the broilers' six-week lifetime. They stay on the same litter their entire lives--broiler houses are only cleaned out between batches of birds. Apparently this stuff is high in crude protein and minerals, and is used as a "concentrate" or supplement to hay and grain. Granted, the manure/litter/yuk mixture is composted at high temperatures to kill bacteria and fungi, but still.... I mean, I'm all for the "reduce, reuse, recycle, rebuy" concept, but this strikes me as going too far in search of cost efficiency.

Cattle are ruminants, designed to digest grasses and similar forages. Cattle were not designed to digest grain, let alone chicken manure. Grain is added to the diet to produce "marbling," or striations of fat in the flesh, which makes the meat more tender and moist when cooked. Chicken manure seems to be a cheap source of protein to feed today's unnaturally-overmuscled beef cattle and fuel the udders of Jersey-type milk cows, who have been bred to produce so much milk that they can no longer physically eat enough grass to support their own mammary glands and must be fed "concentrates."

For those of you with inquiring minds, here's a publication on the practice:
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/poulsc...try_litter.pdf