Why Are Feedlot Steers Lactating? (15-19% of Them, According to the Research)

Feedlot cattle lactating sounds like an internet rumor. It is not. Here is what the research found, what is probably causing it, and the question the people who funded the study were actually trying to answer.

Apparently male cattle on feedlots are lactating at alarming rates....

Personally, the rate of male cattle spontaneously producing milk that I find alarming is ANY.

But somehow the innovative geniuses working in the Big Meat/Corn/Pharma world have managed to pump that number all the way up to 15%+.

If that sounds totally insane and improbable to you, join the club.

When I heard about this, my gut reaction was "no way, this has to be an internet rumor."

My ENTIRE THING is critiquing the flaws and grossness of the industrial ag system, and this one STILL seemed too far fetched.

But it turns out to be just totally 100% true.

What the research actually found

In a study done by a researcher at West Texas A&M, between 15-19% of steers (depending on breed) on large feedlots were found to be LACTATING.

The study examined roughly 20,000 cattle from 33 different feedlots after they'd been slaughtered.

They looked at heifers too (female cows that haven't been pregnant or given birth). Somewhere between 28 and 55% of those were lactating as well. Which is definitely chill and not a problem related to massive drug overuse!

This is, in technical terms, not ideal......

And it begs many, many, many questions. Just so many questions.

The first one being, how isn't this national news?

How on earth is this like a minor point of academic interest?

This came out in 2025. I live and breathe this world and didn't hear about it until recently.

Welp, 1 out of 6 male cows are producing milk when we harvest them for beef that people eat, nothing to see here. Back to the wars and poop lettuce and AI and the neverending election cycle.....

We are living in f*$#ing crazy town.

Why would feedlot cattle lactate? Three theories.

Obviously, the other big question is....

"Why is this thing that seems completely unbelievable happening?"

Unfortunately, that answer is complicated by the fact that there are just so many potential causes.

Theory #1: the steroid implants

Large feedlots commonly implant hormone pellets to stimulate faster growth in the cattle.

The most common blend is Trenbolone Acetate and Estradiol.

You may have heard of Tren, because it's internet famous for being a powerful anabolic cattle steroid that fitness influencers take to get really jacked. Also Bolone sounds like Bologna, and talking about your steroid cycle with the euphemism "TrenBologna Sandwiches" is funny.

Estradiol is basically estrogen and is used to balance out the side effects of the Tren and ensure that the cattle don't put on too much muscle and not enough fat.

Naturally some people think that implanting slow-release steroid pellets in the cattle might have some connection to extremely weird hormone related things happening. This hasn't been "confirmed", but it seems pretty reasonable to anyone who doesn't sell cattle steroid implants for a living.

Theory #2: all the other chemicals

Where to begin with this one? Well there's:

• Feed featuring high percentages of corn and soy, crops that are sprayed heavily with herbicides like glyphosate and atrazine that are known to be estrogenic endocrine disruptors.
• Antibiotics put in the feed rations (again, to promote growth) that disrupt the animal's microbiome and cause weird hormonal activity.
• Relatively heavy use of deworming and fly control chemicals.

Basically just a good ol' chemical cocktail pumped into and on these cattle for the back half of their lives.

....yum.

(On the glyphosate point specifically, here's whether there's glyphosate in your beef.)

Theory #3: how fat these cows are getting

As the national cattle herd has shrunk and cattle get more expensive for feedlots to buy, they naturally keep them a little longer and try to get them as fat and heavy as possible.

The extra fat is itself estrogenic (plus it stores all the fun chemicals from theories 1 and 2) and the extra time and weight may be causing chaos with their hormones.

Now that I'm writing this, I'm kinda surprised it's only 15% lol

The most likely scenario is that it's the combination of all these things....

I know this is a reach and I'm not a scientist or anything, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that possibly, just possibly, being inundated with hormone and gut disrupting chemicals and getting no exercise and being fed highly palatable processed ration filled with chemicals is not ideal for cattle. You can draw your own conclusions about what it does to other mammals.

An open note to feedlot operators

So I just want to say to all the feedlot operators....

I know that Jesse and I both talk a lot of shit about how our beef tastes better because the cattle live longer and flavor concentrates over time.

But please, for the love of god....

Harvest your cattle faster!!!!!

Do not try to copy us.

This is not what we meant!

Just doing the same terrible stuff you're doing for longer is not the move!!!

If a few extra weeks on your management protocol turns your feedlot filled with male cattle into a f*$%ing dairy farm, maybe you SHOULD be processing them younger.....

Alternatively you could just.... not poison the animals that are going to turn into food for people.

Wild concept I know. I'll take my Nobel Prize whenever the committee gets around to it!

Kind of amazing that our cattle live on average 50-100% longer than they do on a feedlot, and none of them spontaneously start producing milk.

Funny how that works....

(For more on that time gap and how it got created, here's why cattle are slaughtered so much younger than they used to be.)

Here's the part that should actually worry you: who funded the study

Now for an interesting little tidbit.

The company that funded the research is none other than Cargill.

AKA one of the Big 4 Meatpackers

Which isn't unusual in and of itself, the big meatpackers fund a lot of beef research.

The interesting part is how the research was framed and what they were trying to figure out.

The number of lactating animals wasn't the finding of the research. It wasn't a shocking discovery.

It's a well known phenomenon in the industry.

Steer lactation is so well known that they went into this study specifically to look at the effects of lactation on beef carcass 'quality' and value.

The question being asked isn't.....

"Why are these not pregnant female and male cattle lactating at insane rates?"

"Holy shit all these cattle that shouldn't be lactating are lactating, how can we be absolutely sure all these implanted hormones and chemicals we're using aren't getting into the meat?"

and, in fairness, it wasn't even "how do we hide this?"

No it was simply....

"Hmmm it seems that all these cattle are spontaneously lactating, I wonder what that is doing to per carcass profitability?"

Which is batshit insane, but also the logical conclusion of a system totally obsessed with efficiency, speed and cheap cost of production.

This is not a conspiracy. It is the design.

I cannot say this loudly enough.

The really insidious, scary part is that this is not some kind of hidden conspiracy, it's just how the corporate food system is designed to work.

No one is hiding this.

It's just a thing that's happening that will be judged as either good or bad based on the only variable they care about: margin.

They would talk about it on a quarterly earnings call.

(For who "they" actually is, here's the Big 4 Meatpackers explained.)

The difference when a real person is looking at the animal

Now, there are a lot of differences between buying beef from a small farm like us and getting whatever the industrial system is churning out....

• The taste comparison is night and day
• The environmental impact of the two styles of production isn't even comparable
• Animal Welfare
• We properly Dry-Age our beef instead of "wet aging" it, so you don't wind up steaming your steak in a puddle of its own water
• Oh and checks notes our cattle don't start spontaneously lactating when they shouldn't be

But the fundamental difference is simple....

When you buy from a small farm (ideally us) you are dealing with real people

If Jesse or I (or one of our butchers) saw a steer lactating, "I wonder what this is doing to the carcass value" is not one of our first 37 questions.

The only relevant questions would be "what the f*%@ is going on?" and "how do we stop this?"

That's not because we're special.

It's just what happens when your business is appropriately sized, when your name is on every package, when you know your customers as individuals and feel a responsibility to provide them with beef that you'd proudly feed your own kids.

Ya know, the exact opposite situation of a giant industrial system where animals and customers are just data points subordinate to the almighty Shareholder Value, the slaughterhouses process 10,000 cattle a day, and it is set up to put as much emotional and legal distance as possible between the people selling the beef and the people eating it.

What you can do about it

Learning this statistic is shocking, but it's not actually surprising.

This is the kind of thing that is going to happen in a system that refuses to stop looking at chemical and pharmaceutical shortcuts as a magical free lunch without unintended consequences.

Spoiler Alert: there are ALWAYS unintended consequences.

You can draw your own conclusions about eating the beef that comes out the back end of that system.....

But if you'd like to just play it safe, and feed your family beef that comes from cattle raised without ever consuming a TrenBologna Sandwich, you can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

Your Farmer,

Josh

P.S. As much as I love to rant and rave about the absolutely insane and 100% true problems in this industry (which are admittedly not bad for Beef Share sales), I'd actually prefer it if we could just reset the timeline to avoid whatever postmodern fever dream we're living in right now.