Your Guide to Beef Cattle Feedlots in Australia

Image credit: Farm Transparency Project

What is a feedlot?

Every year, tens of thousands of cattle are subjected to intense confinement in dirty, barren, enclosed yards for beef production. These yards are called feedlots. They are nothing but factory farms that exist to ensure that cattle gain weight for slaughter as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Although originally primarily used to feed cattle during periods of drought, feedlots today are considered a routine component of beef production. While still useful for ensuring that cattle have access to food in periods of extreme weather, they have become the norm rather than the exception.

The Meat and Livestock Australia definition of a cattle feedlot illustrates the bleakness of the environment: “a confined yard area with watering and feeding facilities where cattle are completely fed by hand or mechanically for the purpose of beef production.”

How does a feedlot work?

Cattle feedlots consist of pens that generally hold between 50 to 300 cattle each. Smaller feedlots may only have a handful of pens, while large feedlots can contain hundreds. These mega-feedlots can cover thousands of hectares and confine tens of thousands of cattle at a time.

Often owned by big international companies, Australian cattle feedlots are getting larger, with some mega-feedlots expanding their capacity to confine 75,000 or more cattle at a time. Cattle can spend between 30 and 600 days on a feedlot, depending on the ultimate retail destination for their beef. Cattle slaughtered and sold domestically tend to spend 100 days or less confined in a feedlot, while cattle destined for international markets routinely spend more than 100 days in confinement. Slower-growing Wagyu cows are confined for the longest period of time, typically 300 days or more.

Pasture vs Feedlots

Australian cattle do not routinely begin their lives on feedlots. Most are born and spend their first months of life on paddocks before being weaned onto pasture. While there are significant animal welfare concerns about life on pasture, this environment does provide cattle with more opportunities and space to express their natural foraging behaviours.

Owing to the radically different environment provided by pasture-based and feedlot housing systems, the transition from pasture to feedlot is one of the most stressful experiences of a cow’s life. It forces cattle to quickly transition from a life of minimal oversight into a completely abnormal, highly restricted artificial environment.

Behind the labels: Grain fed, Grain finished, Wagyu

Australia’s food labelling schemes provide information that may include the country of origin, means of production, and other important considerations for consumers. These labels can often be found on meat products in the supermarket, restaurants and other food providers.

However, our report found that beef producers are not legally required to label whether their product came from an animal who spent time in a feedlot. Instead, they are allowed to use terms such as “grain fed” and “grain finished”. A majority of beef products labelled "Wagyu" also come from feedlots. The lack of clarity in these labels can limit a consumer’s ability to make informed choices about animal welfare. 

In order to make higher welfare choices, it’s important to remember that all of these terms are vague ways to indicate that the meat comes from animals who were confined to these low welfare, barren yards during their final days. Here are some labels you might find on beef products in your local supermarket and what they actually mean in terms of how much time the animal spent on a feedlot:

• Grain Finished: the animals spent 35+ days on a feedlot
• Grain Fed: the animals spent 100+ days on a feedlot
• Wagyu: most animals spent 350-600 days on a feedlot

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Image: Maydan Feedlot. Credit: AnimalKind

Why are feedlots bad for cows?

Like other forms of factory farming, such as battery cages and sow stalls, cattle feedlots are a form of close confinement. Because of this, feedlots are fundamentally unable to provide animals with a good quality of life. While other animal industries are generally moving away from close confinement and providing more enrichment opportunities for the animals in their supply chain, an increasing number of Australian cattle are confined to feedlots. This has created a variety of animal welfare concerns which are compounded by a lack of nationally enforced regulations.

Current laws don’t require feedlots to protect cows from heat

Feedlots are under no legal obligation to provide shelter from the elements. Cattle are regularly exposed to extreme heat, unsanitary conditions, and disease outbreaks. Cattle are often mixed with unfamiliar social groups and are not provided with adequate space to avoid unwanted social interactions. Because the pens often have no foliage and no soft, clean places to rest, the animals regularly lie in thick mud and their own waste. This can lead to an increase in footrot and other negative health outcomes.

Industry standards recommend that cattle feedlots be cleaned every 13 weeks, but this is not a legal requirement and studies have shown that some feedlots may be cleaned as infrequently as three times a year.

How feedlots contradict the Five Domains of Animal Welfare

The Five Domains is a best practice system for evaluating animal welfare, widely accepted by both industry and NGOs. It measures the mental and physical wellbeing of an animal based on both positive and negative experiences. There is a focus on providing positive experiences rather than simply avoiding harm. Under the Five Domains, it’s clear that feedlots fundamentally fail to provide positive experiences for cattle. 

1. Behaviour

Standard: Animals are able to express a full range of natural behaviours such as exploration, foraging, bonding, playing and retreating.

Reality of cattle feedlots: Feedlots fundamentally restrict the ability to express natural behaviours.

2. Nutrition

Standard: Animals have opportunities to access unrestricted, sufficient, species-specific, balanced, varied and clean food and water.

Reality of cattle feedlots: Feedlots see cows moved from eating grass to grain, a dietary change that often results in digestive disorders such as acidosis. Foraging opportunities in a feedlot are largely non-existent.

3. Environment

Standard: The animal’s environment provides comfort through temperature, flooring, space, air, odour, noise and predictability.

Reality of cattle feedlots: Confinement in a feedlot limits an animal’s environment, often restricting their access to shade, clean flooring and space to perform natural behaviours.

4. Mental State

Standard: By presenting positive situations and/or solutions in the previous four functional domains, the mental state of the animal should benefit from predominantly positive states, such as pleasure, comfort, or vitality while reducing negative states such as fear, frustration, hunger, pain, or boredom.

Reality of cattle feedlots: Feedlots are barren environments that limit the ability of cattle to exercise choice and offer no enrichment opportunities, which can lead to frustration, boredom and abnormal behaviour.

5. Health

Standard: Animals are in good health, and illnesses and injuries are prevented, or immediately and appropriately treated.

Reality of cattle feedlots: Feedlots carry the intrinsic risk of compromised health, including bovine respiratory disease, acidosis and lameness.

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Liver disease

Liver disease is common in feedlot cattle, with a recent study by Meat and Livestock Australia demonstrating that 16% of livers examined from grain fed beef carcasses were condemned due to disease. Liver abscesses are caused by aggressive grain feeding programs and ruminal lesions from acidosis. The rate of abscesses in Australian feedlotted cattle can range from 10 to 20% of the herd. This organ damage can be a complication from grain poisoning brought about by the sudden dietary shift that takes place upon induction into a feedlot.

Dags and high-pressure washes

Cattle feedlots are so dirty that cows often develop “dags”, which are defined as, “severe balls of manure and mud that form bonds to the hide due to the sugar content of the grains the cattle consume”. In some situations, individuals may carry as much as 3.7kg of dags on their bodies. In order to remove these painful mats, cattle are sprayed with high-pressure hoses that can cause stress and injury.

Footrot

The feet of cattle on a feedlot are constantly exposed to mud and manure. The wet, muddy and dirty conditions in many feedlots leave cattle vulnerable to hoof damage and infection. Any injury to their hooves is an entry point for bacteria that are living in the faecal matter and mud that coats the ground. These wounds can lead to a condition called footrot, which leads to painful lameness, abscesses, infection and death. According to the Queensland Government, “Cattle may stand with the foot raised, be reluctant to move, lose their appetite, lose weight, and have a low-grade fever. If left untreated, lameness becomes increasingly severe, with infection extending to the joints and other deeper structures of the foot”.

Stocking density

The current recommended feedlot stocking density is between 9 to 25 square metres per Standard Cattle Unit (SCU), which is the industry’s term for an animal who weighs 600kg at the end of their life. Cows are often mixed with unfamiliar social groups and lack adequate space to roam freely as compared to their life on pasture. As they grow unnaturally quickly, their living space becomes increasingly restricted and cramped. The lowest stocking density, the maximum recommended space for a cow in a feedlot, is smaller than the average studio apartment. Most people would agree that sharing a space that size with a dog would feel cramped. Imagine how claustrophobic it might feel to a cow who lived most of their life freely roaming on pasture.

Pregnancy and calf welfare

Cattle feedlots are not a suitable place for pregnant cows and newborn calves. Even though it is not encouraged to transition pregnant cows to feedlots, unfortunately due to the high volume of cattle on many feedlots, it is almost guaranteed there will be incidents in which calves are born in a feed pen. Animal rights organisation AnimalKind has documented the discarded bodies of heavily pregnant cows and young calves on feedlots, some of whom were left unburied and were consumed by wildlife.

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Together, we can take the ‘factory’ out of ‘farming’

In order to create a more humane future, it is up to governments, investors, food retailers and consumers to take steps that will create better oversight, animal welfare conditions, and humane alternatives to cattle feedlots.

Here are some of our recommendations to help individuals combat this cruel practice and give every cow a life worth living:

• Start to identify beef products that come from cattle feedlots. Grain-fed, Wagyu and grain-finished labels are the easiest to spot and avoid.
• Labelling should be designed to help consumers easily avoid animal suffering when they make a purchase. When purchasing beef products, ask your food service providers to clearly label the products that come from cattle feedlots.
• Increase the amount of plant-based foods that you consume. If you do choose to eat meat, make sure to choose the highest welfare products available and avoid beef from feedlots.

With you by our side, we’re calling on the Government to:

• Establish an Independent Office of Animal Welfare that is dedicated to developing, auditing, and enforcing national animal welfare standards. There should be a dedicated Minister for Animal Welfare, separate from the Agriculture portfolio.
• Require the use of shade and pain relief during routine husbandry procedures across the entire beef supply chain.
• Invest in programs that assist farmers who want to increase animal welfare standards in their business or transition away from industrial animal agriculture.
• Mandate labelling of feedlotted beef.
• Ensure that there is a national, transparent data system that allows Australians to track the environmental and animal welfare data of the food that they buy.

Together, we can take the ‘factory’ out of ‘farming’.

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