How do they help the industry? I'll speak to the ionophores.
There are really the two points that have been brought up, and one is that if we keep animals healthier by using drugs like ionophores, we're using drugs that are of zero importance or very low importance in human medicine. If we can use those tools to keep animals from getting sick to begin with, that means fewer animals get sick, fewer animals get really sick, and fewer animals get really, really sick, which means we don't need to use the high-powered drugs to fix them. That's one benefit to the industry.
The other benefit is in terms of the growth promotion and feed efficiency. It allows us to use our feed resources more efficiently. We can get more pounds of beef out of the same clump of hay and grain than we could without using it. In terms of the ionophores, there is a health benefit there in terms of preventing coccidiosis, which is a good disease issue for cattle and all livestock, I believe.
But then one of the real interesting ones with the ionophores--I hope I don't get too nerdy here--is that the way these things work is they promote the growth of bacteria that produce a molecule called propionate, which is used more efficiently in the animal's metabolism. So I'm not going to go any further into that.
One of the classes of bacteria that the ionophores inhibit is a group called methanogens, which is really interesting, because they're the ones that produce methane. So by feeding ionophores, we are improving feed efficiency. We're having absolutely zero impact on human health and there's actually the side environmental benefit in terms of greenhouse gas, in addition to the fact that we're using fewer resources to produce beef.