Beef cattle browse more than 11 million acres of grazing lands in the State of Florida. Such large herds naturally generate large quantities of manure and other waste. What is being done to manage this challenge to the environment?

Researchers at Kansas State University are investigating an apparent link between cattle fed distiller’s grain and increasing instances of E. coli tainted beef.

Evidence has surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones. Executives from the nation's major cattle cloning companies conceded yesterday that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food supply, despite a years-old request by the FDA.

We should all ask ourselves this question. Do we really want to continue to eat animals, or will their cloned body parts satisfy us? While looking an animal in the eye, I wonder how many of us could really do what is necessary to provide that meat.

A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to marketing meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.Where's the beef? Over there in the Petri dish!

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad-cow disease, is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease in cattle, that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord. BSE has a long incubation period, about 4 years, usually affecting adult cattle at a peak age onset of four to five years, all breeds being equally susceptible. In the United Kingdom, the country worst affected, 179,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million killed as a precaution.It is believed, but not proven, that the disease may be transmitted to human beings who eat infected carcasses. In humans, it is known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD), and by June 2007, it had killed 165 people in Britain, and six elsewhere with the number expected to rise because of the disease's long incubation period. Between 460,000 and 482,000 BSE-infected animals had entered the human food chain before controls on high-risk offal were introduced in 1989.A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by feeding cattle, who are normally herbivores, the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which caused the infectious agent to spread. The origin of the disease itself remains unknown. The infectious agent is distinctive for the high temperatures at which it remains viable; this contributed to the spread of the disease in Britain, which had reduced the temperatures used during its rendering process. Another contributory factor was the feeding of infected protein supplements to very young calves.