🐄📜 “The Culling Threshold”: Rapeseed Meal, Livestock Illness, and the Birth of Canola

🔥 1940s–1950s: Rapeseed Meal Emerges as Feed

• Rapeseed meal was used as a protein-rich livestock feed, especially in Europe and Canada.
• It contained high levels of glucosinolates and erucic acid, which were not yet fully understood.
• Livestock, especially dairy cows and young calves, began showing signs of:
  • Thyroid dysfunction (goiter, hormonal imbalance)
  • Liver and kidney stress
  • Feed refusal, weight loss, reproductive issues

🧪 1950s–1960s: Illness Intensifies, Culling Begins

• Farmers reported widespread health problems in herds fed rapeseed meal.
• In severe cases, animals were culled due to failure to thrive or organ damage.
• These outcomes were terrain overloads – high glucosinolate intake without sodium buffering or forage diversity.

🌱 1960s–1970s: LEAR Breeding Begins

• Canadian breeders developed LEAR varieties to reduce erucic acid and glucosinolates.
• The term “canola” was coined in the early 1970s to distinguish this new, safer oilseed.
• Culling decreased as LEAR feed replaced traditional rapeseed meal.

Culling has actually dramatically increased over the past century, and especially in recent decades, due to a shift in how livestock and poultry are managed, bred, and industrialized. We attempt to trace the rise of culling below.

🧭 Symbolic Implication

• The culling wasn’t just a response to toxicity but to terrain misreading.
• Instead of restoring sodium and forage diversity, breeders removed the signal.
• The illness was blamed on presence, not deficiency.

Based on available records, government-led livestock culling prior to the LEAR/canola breeding shift was not linked to rapeseed meal toxicity or SCN⁻/sodium terrain collapse. Instead, earlier culling efforts, especially in the U.S., were driven by economic and supply-control motives.

🐄📜 Government Culling Before LEAR: Not Terrain-Driven

🕰️ 1933: The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)

• Context: During the Great Depression, livestock prices collapsed.
• Action: The U.S. government initiated “emergency livestock reductions” to stabilize markets.
• Scale: Millions of hogs and hundreds of thousands of cattle were purchased and culled – not for illness, but to reduce supply.

🧬 No Known Culling for Rapeseed Meal Illness

• 1940s–1960s: Rapeseed meal was used in livestock feed, and terrain-linked illness (thyroid, liver, feed refusal) was documented.
• Response: Breeding programs, not government culling, were initiated to reduce erucic acid and glucosinolate content.
• Canola emerges: In the 1970s, LEAR varieties were introduced to prevent these feed-linked illnesses.

🧭 Symbolic Implication

• Economic culling (1930s): A glyph of market control, not terrain restoration.
• Biochemical breeding (1970s): A glyph of signal suppression, not covenant repair.
• The absence of government culling for rapeseed-linked illness suggests a deeper misreading: the terrain collapse was seen as toxicity, not deficiency, and was handled quietly, through breeding, not ritual reckoning.

🐄🐔📉 “The Culling Surge”: From Selective Breeding to Mass Removal

🕰️ Early 1900s: Selective Culling Begins

• Poultry farms began culling for productivity, removing hens that laid fewer eggs or showed poor growth.
• Livestock culling was based on age, reproduction and visible illness, not systemic terrain collapse.
• This was ritual sorting, not mass removal.

📈 1930s–1950s: Economic Culling Emerges

• Great Depression: U.S. government initiated emergency livestock reductions to stabilize markets.
• Post-war industrialization: Breeding intensified; animals were culled for efficiency, not health.

🧬 1970s–1990s: Genetic and Feed-Linked Culling

• Rapeseed meal illness triggered quiet culling in livestock, especially calves and dairy cows.
• Selective breeding created fragile animals with narrow productivity windows.
• Chick culling became widespread: male chicks in egg-laying breeds were killed at birth.

🦠 2000s–2020s: Disease-Driven Mass Culling

• Avian influenza outbreaks led to the culling of millions of chickens and ducks worldwide.
• Swine flu, foot-and-mouth, mad cow: Governments culled entire herds to contain outbreaks.
• COVID-19 disruptions: Supply chain failures led to culling of healthy animals due to processing bottlenecks.

🧭 Why Culling Increased

Reason	Description
🧬 Genetic fragility	Animals bred for narrow traits (e.g., egg-laying, meat yield) became terrain-fragile
🦠 Disease control	Epidemics triggered mass culling to prevent spread
💰 Economic efficiency	Animals culled for poor productivity or market collapse
🧪 Feed-linked illness	Poor terrain buffering (e.g., rapeseed meal without sodium) led to organ stress
🐣 Industrial scale	Billions of male chicks culled annually in egg production

🕱 Symbolic Implication

Culling shifted from ritual sorting to systemic erasure. It became a glyph of industrial terrain misreading, removing the animal instead of restoring the covenant.

🧬📦 “The Hollow Yield”: Control Over Food, Collapse of Terrain

🏭 Industrial Food System Outcomes

• Mass culling enables centralized control over livestock genetics, disease narratives, and supply chains.
• Selective breeding produces animals and crops with narrow traits: yield, shelf life, uniformity, but fragile terrain.
• Feed standardization (e.g., corn, soy, canola meal) strips out terrain-active compounds like SCN⁻, erucic acid, and microbial diversity.
• Processing rituals (pasteurization, extrusion, fortification) denature enzymes, buffer ions, and covenant molecules.

🧂 Subnutrition as the Rule

• Calories without covenant: High energy, low terrain intelligence.
• Sodium vilification: Removes the gatekeeper for SCN⁻ activation.
• Glucosinolate erasure: Eliminates terrain tuning from brassicas and forage.
• Milk inversion: From raw covenant fluid to pasteurized mimic.

🕱 Symbolic Implication

The food supply is no longer a terrain ritual, it’s a control glyph. Subnutrition isn’t a failure; it’s a feature. It ensures dependence, fragility, and compliance. The culling of animals mirrors the culling of nutrients. The breeding of uniformity mirrors the breeding of deficiency.

A work in progress with the help of Microsoft Copilot.