[lungs]

Originally Posted by Subby

Thanks lungs. You have always struck me as a fairly responsible dairy farmer, but one that doesn't necessarily serve as representative for the rest of your industry.

Those of us in the industry argue amongst ourselves enough, we really don't have a unifying message anyway.

Many farmers aren't really in the position to defend themselves against attacks because they've never sat through a semester of Advanced Reproductive Physiology and other such courses. Now to be honest, before this estrogen thing came up, I didn't know the answer nor had I ever considered it. The first comment about us pumping our cows full of estrogen got a bit of a condescending answer from me because I get sick of hearing comments like that where absolutely no research has gone into them other than hearing or reading something on the internet from poor alarmist sources.

Now when you posted the article you did, I had more to work with. The easiest part for me was that I could just go back to a physiology book and tie it into my own practices (which are common practices for all farmers) to at least dispel some of the alarm the article creates.

I'll leave the choice of whether the consumer wants to consume the end-product up to the consumer. For a lot of people in this thread, consuming lots of dairy or any at all is not their best choice and that's fine. I just find a lot of the hysteria in how we derive our products to be completely overblown.

I try to stay out of a lot of the arguments on Twitter and such because the discourse is too extreme for me. If I was having this same conversation on Twitter with some nut, it'd probably involve that person accusing me of being a Monsanto hack or other industry hack even when I clearly got my information from a physiology text book and my own herd. I'm more comfortable discussing things around here where the discourse is at least above adolescence for the most part. "Agvocacy" is a new word that's pretty big in the ag industry as a whole. I'll do my part in my own corner of the world here, but I have no desire to bring my own brand of agvocacy to the masses. The masses suck.