Cows are a renewable resource — in a sense. They can regenerate, but not instantaneously — there is a delay. So you can’t erode your stock of cattle in the name of growth, nothing natural lasts forever. That’s what some Brazilian farmers are discovering:

“BARRETOS, Brazil—In the dead of night at a slaughterhouse in Brazil’s southeastern farming belt, a group of men splattered in blood gathered around the entrails of a cow to see if they had hit gold.

‘Just look at the size of that,’ one worker said as he pressed the animal’s flesh through a sieve to reveal a hardened dark orange lump almost as big as a golf ball, glistening under the fluorescent light.

There it was: a gallstone.

One of the most prized ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine, cattle gallstones have become so valuable that traders are willing to pay as much as $5,800 an ounce—twice the price of gold—for the nuggets of hardened bile.” - Samantha Pearson, of The Wall Street Journal (link)

Farm hands report sifting through bloody entrails looking for gallstones. Once found, the stones are placed in a safe located in a secure backroom. I’m reminded of scenes from action thrillers where people go to secure rooms to open up some type of hazardous or precious material. For some, gallstones are that precious.

A market is a system. Where there’s demand meets supply. My fear is that the high demand may cause people to seek growth opportunities at the expense of their resources.

I share that same concern for the world outside of Brazil and her cows.