Description

With the rapid rise of the industrial food animal production system, an increasing number of food animals once raised on pastures are now raised in feedlots. Feedlot-raised animals are kept indoors for the majority of the year, and they are given feed formulated to speed their growth to market weight and supply them with essential nutrients, while minimizing costs to operators. Concerns have arisen about the content of these feeds, however, as grain-based diets can produce serious and sometimes fatal digestive tract problems in food animals such as cows, goats, and sheep whose stomachs are best suited to digesting high-cellulose containing plants like grass.