Last night on CBS, Katie Couric took an in depth look at the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Factory farmers who want to keep their herds healthy and growing quickly have found that the easiest and most cost-efficient way to do so is to include small doses of antibiotics in the livestock feed.

What’s wrong with keeping your hogs healthy? Well, as Couric points out, “some people say giving animals antibiotics to prevent illness or promote growth is like putting antibiotics in a child’s cereal.” Overuse of antibiotics leads to the creation of super-bugs, or antibiotic resistant bacterial strains. At one poultry plant in Arkansas, 37 workers developed MSRA, or methicillin resistant staph, an infection very difficult to treat due to its resistance to most antibiotics. More than one person developed an MSRA infection 12 times. The report also mentions a study carried out by the University of Iowa, which found that 70% of hogs and 64% of workers on several farms in the midwest contained a strain of MSRA. At farms that don’t use antibiotics, not a single strain of the infection was found. These are scary numbers.

So what’s the bottom line? You need to know that your meat is antibiotic free. And the best way to be sure is to talk to your farmer. You can feel confident eating Lava Lake Lamb, because we never feed our animals antibiotics.

To learn more, watch the clip here, or read the accompanying article. You can check out the second half of Couric’s two-part series, tonight on CBS.

This week on Oprah: Rosie O’Donnell, Denise Richards and tomorrow, Michael Pollan. What a lineup! I know that we’ve been talking about Oprah more than you might expect of a sustainable grass fed lamb ranch, but we’re still so excited about our mention in the O Magazine article on online food shopping, and we can’t wait to hear what Michael Pollan suggests to Oprah’s millions of viewers.

We were honored to host Michael Pollan at Lava Lake Ranch in the fall of 2008. Mr. Pollan was in town to give a lecture at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, and spent the afternoon touring Lava Lake Ranch on horseback and learning about our efforts to raise lamb in an environmentally sound, sustainable manner.

Michael Pollan’s investigations into our food systems and the culture and economics of eating have helped fuel a food revolution in America, with more and more people considering the impact their food choices have on their local economies, the environment, and the planet. Pollan is the author, most recently, of Food Rules and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post.