farmdoc's blog post number 55

Grumpy Old Men is the title of a 1993 film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Grumpy I was as a boy and then as a man. Now I am a grumpy old man. As a GOM I am irritated by mindless jargon, e.g. all about, totally and frankly. But my all-time favourite is no-brainer (which Wikipedia calls a thought-terminating cliché). In my 27 May 2008 blog post I wrote about two items of agricultural wisdom I had read in Tasmanian Country. In last week’s issue another appeared. Titled ‘Grass is good’, it quotes a British research finding that cows grazing on grass and clover produce more antioxidants and vitamins in their milk, than cows feeding on silage and cereals. And the widest difference is between organic and non-organic milk. (Though separate from this research, it is also known that the meat of cattle grazed on pasture is substantially lower in fat than the meat of grain-fed cattle.) Well big bloody whoopy do! Even children know that cattle – and sheep and goats too – are designed to digest grass, which is why they have multiple stomach chambers and chew their cud. So if you eat meat and drink milk from grain-fed feedlot cattle, you deserve what you (don't) get. I would call that a no-brainer – that is, if I wasn’t a GOM. Ruminate on it.