As part of our ongoing expert Q&A series, a conversation with world-renowned livestock expert Temple Grandin on humane handling, small vs. big, transparency, and the future of agriculture

Temple Grandin has been a thought leader in both the animal agriculture and autism realms for decades. Grandin, the world's most well-known autistic person, is a New York Times best-selling author, a professor of animal science, a consultant to the leading food companies, and a noted speaker on animal behavior and autism. She attributes her success in improving humane handling systems for livestock, systems that now impact around half the cattle in North America, to her different way of thinking. "As a person with autism, it is easy for me to understand how animals think because my thinking processes are like an animal's," she says. Earlier this year, Grandin was named a "Hero" among TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people and was the subject of the HBO film Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes.

Food Safety News recently sat down with Grandin to discuss meat production and humane handling.

Part I of the interview,  discussing big vs. small ag and the need for more transparency in the meat system appeared in Food Safety News yesterday.

Part II

Q: So much of what we do see are the really bad examples, the undercover whistleblower stuff...the veal in Vermont, the recent dairy incident...

A: That was horrible, horrible, just horrible. That guy [from Conklin dairy] also has felony charges on an illegal gun.

Q: Are these isolated incidents?

A: Most places are not doing stuff that horrible. To say that every dairy treats their animals that way, no, that's wrong, they're not. But on the other hand, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, between the animal rights advocates that say everything is an atrocity, to the industry who says everything's just fine. I've worked in a lot of places. It's somewhere in the middle. It's a constant battle. You can't under staff and overwork. Tired people are more likely to get angry, and so are overworked people.

Q: What about high turnover?

A: Well, if you treat the people decently you want have such high turnover. I was horrified to find out about a dairy that was working its Mexican employees 12 hours a day and not giving them lunch breaks, that's just terrible. I think we have to have more customers getting involved. I just read something about people jumping off the roof in some factory in China. Well, whosever electronics electronic doo-dads are getting made in that factory, those companies need to go into those factories and straighten this out. That's unacceptable. Customers drive change.

Q: Knowing what you know, are there certain things that you avoid, do you understand the difficulties consumers face trying to make sense of all of this?

A: I'm very concerned about what I call biological system overload. We're pushing chickens, turkeys, dairy cows, and other animals to where they're falling apart. We're seeing lameness and abnormal growth problems. Beef cattle still live outside so we haven't messed them up.

Q: Do you think that affects us?

A: No, no I don't think it affects us. A lot of people think chickens are fed hormones and they're not. The chickens just grow really fast because they've been bred to grow really fast. It's genetics. Same thing with turkeys.

Q: Do you have confidence in the way we raise, slaughter, and process meat?

A: When it's done right, yeah. Things have to be done right. You've got to figure out critical control points are really important, and you've got to do it right. 

Q: Do you take issue with the subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed?

A: The thing that's not known, when it comes to antibiotics in feed, is that a lot of it comes out the backside of the animal. What does that do? It's a massive, uncontrolled experiment. I'm not worried about eating the meat, that doesn't worry me. The meat's fine. With the antibiotics you've got science and nature...I'm reading a ton of red flags. I'm going to call them red flags at this point.

Let's look real sensible into the future... There's things that big Ag can learn from organic. In the future, there will be a new large scale type of commercial agriculture. We're still going to use chemicals, we're still going to use antibiotics, but we're going to use a whole lot less of them. We're going to adopt some of these crop rotation practices, get rid of some of the monoculture and kind of make a new large-scale commercial that will be economical. But, as long as corn and oil are cheap, this no economic incentive to change.

Somewhere in the middle I can see some kind of a hybrid thing forming. Right now, big Ag looks at Michael Pollan as being kind of evil. Well I say, 'there's a lot of things that Michael Pollan and you agree on, have you ever actually read the book?'

© Food Safety News