Is Hearst Ranch Beef safe from E. coli?
The virulent strain of E. coli is not present in our animals and we only harvest our own animals so our customers know exactly the origin of our meat. Because we allow nature to play its role—healthy fields make a healthy ecosystem, and that means healthy cattle—the animals maintain their health with very little intervention from us. Free-range animals stay quite clean, and we don’t rely on intensive corn-feeding programs which have the unfortunate effect of acidifying the cow’s gut. Most of the microbes that live in a cow’s system, and occasionally find their way into our food, get killed off by our own stomach acids, since those microbes originally evolved in a neutral-pH environment. (The normal rumen, or first chamber of the cow’s stomach, is a neutral pH. Human digestive systems are acidic and kill off most E. coli strains introduced through the diet.) The best-known example of this virulent strain is the infamous E. coli O157:H7. Approximately 60 people per year die of this bacte
