A Fox News segment recently covered a lawsuit filed against Whole Foods, challenging their beef’s “No Antibiotics, Ever” claim.
An activist group whose mission is to “end factory farming” bought beef at multiple Whole Foods stores in various cities over two years and lab tested the beef. Then, to bolster what looks to us nonlawyers to be a weak case, they patched in another project done by another group and used it to cast an unfavorable light on the raised without antibiotics (RWA) industry.
The underlying story is that the group, Farm Forward, helped develop the “no antibiotics,” “no pharmaceutical” Global Animal Partnership (GAP) program in concert with Whole Foods—and the organizations see themselves as unrequited partners in a program that isn’t perfect.
Groups that realize they can’t yet outlaw mainstream beef production and beef consumption try a gradual “frog in hot water” strategy.
Farm Forward says it is a “national public interest animal protection organization,” based in Portland, OR, whose mission is “to end factory farming.” The complaint claims in several places that the use of antibiotics is “indicative of poor genetic health and crowded conditions” and that animals are given subtherapeutic antibiotics to promote growth and “keep them alive” in “conditions that would otherwise stunt their growth and even kill them.”
The suit involves Whole Foods, but given the complexities of the beef production chain and no national animal ID program, the record here is really pretty good.
The data handling in the complaint is vague, either sloppily analyzed and communicated, or purposefully lacking. Over a two-year period, Farm Forward bought beef in six different stores in four cities.
They used two different labs for residue testing. The number of packages tested and the type, sensitivity and methodology of testing are not specified, nor are the cuts. Ground beef would skew and complicate the results. They found some residues on just six packages—monensin (one package) and an anthelmintic (five packages)—indicating antibiotic and anthelmintic use sometime in the animal’s lifetime, but no therapeutic drugs.
We don’t know sample numbers, stores or dates. We know the group spent $80,000 on products and testing. That indicates a pretty large sample number, yielding only six residues, at an unknown level.
The complaint then shifts to another study not specifically about Whole Foods’ beef supply but about RWA in general. The complaint extrapolates, misleads and simply makes up conclusions from that study. In places, the complaint is an activist’s screed against mainstream livestock production, not a legal brief.
The study on a RWA cattle feeding program contains some detail. The complaint itself said 42% of the feedyards in the study had at least one animal test positive for antibiotics. And 15% of those raised without antibiotics came from “a lot that tested positive for antibiotics.” And finally, the complaint says 1 out of 5 GAP certified cattle had been treated with antibiotics.
The real numbers from “Policy reforms for antibiotic use claims in livestock,” published in the scientific journal Science on April 8, reveal a different picture.
That study involved 38,219 fed cattle, divided into 312 study lots from 33 feedyards. On average, two animals from each lot of cattle were urine tested over a seven-month period in 2020 at a packing house, for a total of 699 head. Of 33 feedyards, there were no residues found from 19 feedyards, representing 85% of the total number of head (32,486 head). Seven yards had only one head show residues.
There were four yards that had multiple positive animal tests, several of which had large numbers of RWA cattle on feed (22 to 35 pens). Of the 13 lots that had both animals test positive for some residue, almost all of the lots (12) came from three feedyards.
The big leap of “analysis” comes next. Taking all cattle in the study, 12.5% of the lots had one or two animals test positive.
The complaint said that a “subset” (no number) of all the antibiotic-free cattle were further certified as GAP Animal Welfare Certified. It claims that testing “indicates” that 1 out of 5 animals supposed to be GAP certified antibiotic free had been treated with antibiotics.
But mathematically, those numbers are impossible. Of the 38,219 total head, 85% came from lots with no positive tests. That leaves 5,733 head from lots with one or two positives, some unknown number of which could have tested positive but not all. Further, they weren’t all GAP cattle, so the number would be smaller than 5,733. The complaint’s 1 out of 5 claim would have required 7,644 of all cattle to test positive. Impossible. — Steve Dittmer, WLJ columnist
(Steve Dittmer is the author of the Agribusiness Freedom Foundation newsletter. Views in the column do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of WLJ or its editorial staff.)
