Sometimes a person listens to a speaker and really gets the message. Many of you probably listen to or have heard of Trent Loos. He spoke at the XXII Range Beef Cow Symposium in Mitchell, Nebraska this past year and was wonderful to listen to.

Loos has an objective for all of us in the Agricultural industry and that is to tell our story and tell it to anyone who will listen. He started off his talk with the phrase “Too Much of what they know isn’t so.” How true is that? Much of what is publicized today are the non typical situations in the industry that reflects a negative image. How often do we see stories that tell what we actual do? We conserve the environment while taking natural resources and convert it to food that feeds the world. We work together as family units teaching and instilling values in our children. We are recyclers (guard rails as fences, tires as watering tanks), caretakers (we take care of our livestock we depend on them for our living) and dreamers (pass the farm from one generation to the next). With that being said, why would we do anything else besides preserve our land?

Loos went on to talk about other aspects of the Agricultural Industry such as feeding the world is only going to be accomplished by efficiently producing food, which means using technology. This may not be the way everyone wants their food and that is okay, this is why there are niche markets. However, to affordable to produce food, research and technology provided by Land Grant Institutions, must be utilized.

A misconception that Loos specifically talked about with a comical story is the use of implants in beef. The conception is that the estrogen from the implant increases the amount of estrogen in beef. Here are a few facts about the amount of estrogen in implanted beef versus non implanted beef and other types of food and people. 

A 3.5oz. portion of
• beef from a non implanted steer has 1.3 nanograms of estrogen
• beef from an implanted steer has 1.9 nanograms of estrogen
• potato has 245 nanograms of estrogen

One final tidbit from Dr. Smith the former head of the Meat Science Department at Texas A &M, “The amount of natural hormones in the beef we consume is a tiny fraction of what our own bodies produces naturally. A man’s body produces 15,000 times the amount of estrogen hormones, daily, than he can get from 1 lb. of beef while a pregnant woman’s body produces several million times that amount."

This article is based on a presentation at the Range Beef Cow Symposium, Nov 29-Dec 1, 2011 in Mitchell, NE. The symposium is jointly sponsored and coordinated by the Extension Services of South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming.