Dr Wallach – I grew up on a beef farm in Missouri and like everybody else that raises livestock we grew our own feed to stay in business. We’d take the grain and add vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals to it and grind this up and made pellets. We fed these pellets to calves for about six to nine months and then ship them off to markets. We always save back the very best ones for ourselves, knock them int he head and eat them–it’s a real simple cycle on the farm. The thing that fascinated me as a teenager was that we went to a great deal of trouble for those calves and yet as a family we ate out of the very same fields, but we didn’t give ourselves the same vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals we gave the calves. I always used to ask my dad, I said, “hey Pops, how come we go to all this trouble for those calves and not for ourselves?” And he’d say, “Shut up boy, you’re getting farm fresh food, fresh air, lots of free exercise, don’t ask complicated questions.” I was glad to get rid of the farm exercise and go to AG school at the University of Missouri. I majored in animal husbandry and nutrition, and my minor was in field crops and soils, and I learned technical things about soil chemistry and how it related to bushel per acre and AG economics. But I didn’t get an answer to my basic question until the first year in veterinarian school at the University of Missouri. There I learned the reason why we put all these vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals into animal fee–it’s because we don’t have medical insurance for animals. If we were to use our human healthcare type of system for animals it would be a sticker shock for you. Hamburger would cost you $275 a lb, boneless skinless chicken breasts would be $450 a lb, and a dozen eggs would be $50, just to pay for the health car. So we learned we could keep the price of animal products such as meat, dairy, poultry, and eggs down to where the average American could afford them by significantly reducing or totally eliminating health care costs for animals by preventing and curing diseases with nutrition.
