In Meat We Trust

by Maureen Ogle

  Those conflicts and the ongoing pressure of urban development in the western United States did not bode well for cattle ranchers or consumers. As grazing acres shrank, so would the ability to raise cattle, and beef prices would inch upward. What to do? “More of the growing period will have to be in feedlots,” Warren Monfort argued, and less on the range. Instead of keeping cattle on grass until age two or three, as was customary, ranchers would have to sell them as yearlings in order to make room for new stock. Those yearlings would go to feedlots. Put simply, if American consumers wanted to keep eating beef at a price they would pay, cattle would have to spend more time eating grain than eating grass.

  And so Warren Monfort began the journey that led him to become the nation’s largest cattle feeder. In the late 1940s he remodeled and expanded his feedlot in order to accommodate younger cattle and more of them. He installed equipment that automated the feeding process and configured feed formulas designed for cattle of various ages. But Monfort did not reinvent the wheel. The model he emulated, he told a journalist some years later, could be found “across the mountains” in California. “Out there they didn’t have to unlearn anything such as we do in changing from the small farm feedlot” to a factorylike, automated operation.

  It was true. The commercial feedlots that emerged in the plains states in the 1950s were based on ones built in the 1940s along the Pacific coast, especially in California. Californians had been breeding and grazing cattle for two centuries, but when World War II broke out, West Coast ranchers found it impossible to keep up with demand. Between 1940 and 1955, California’s population doubled from 6 to 12 million. Despite the state’s well-established commercial farming industry, food of all sorts, and especially meat and milk, was in short supply. But conventional feeding and dairying operations could not keep pace for two other reasons: as was true elsewhere in the United States during the war, agricultural labor was in short supply, and in California, farmland was being devoured by factories, airstrips, and housing. To adapt, landowners converted conventional farms into factorylike operations designed to yield maximum quantities of food using minimal labor and land. Cattle feeders replaced human labor with machinery and pasture with fenced, and often paved, lots. Conventional livestock feed was scarce, so feeders relied on alfalfa and barley, as well as sugar beet tops and pulp, citrus rinds, almond husks, and other wastes from canning plants. Add vitamin and protein supplements designed to replicate the nutritional value of corn, toss the ingredients into a machine and mix, and feeders were in business.

  During the 1940s, that combination of high demand, alternative feedstuffs, and shrinking supplies of both labor and land fostered the construction of dozens of mechanized commercial feedlots across California. Consider the McDougal Livestock Company, located halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco. The feedlot held fifteen thousand animals; in a year, McDougal turned out about forty thousand market-ready cattle. But McDougal’s proprietors were not conventional cattlemen. They were contractors who fed cattle for owners who paid to board their livestock at McDougal and who collected the animals once they were ready to be sold. At any one time, a third to half of the feedlots’ inhabitants were owned by packing companies and traveled directly from feedlot to slaughterhouse, no stockyard or middleman needed. That, too, was a California innovation, and by the late forties, 90 percent of California feeder cattle were sold directly to packers. As urban pressure squeezed land prices, many California feeders transferred their operations to Arizona, where there was still plenty of relatively cheap land as well as other big feedlots. Consider the Tovrea Land and Cattle Company near Phoenix. The Tovrea family had been raising cattle in the area since the 1880s and over the years had built a small packinghouse and feed mill. But in the late 1940s, the family sold the packinghouse in order to focus on feeding, thirty-five thousand head at a time. An adjacent company-owned mill churned out eighty-two thousand tons a year of feed made from hay, milo, barley, cottonseed hulls, and cottonseed meal. A network of conveyors and augers transported the rations from mill to feedlot, where another set of augers mixed the feed to precise specifications and carried it directly to the feed bunks. The number of hands needed to manage the stock? A mere seventeen. And like the McDougal venture, Tovrea owned almost none of the animals. Instead, it provided “custom” and “specification” feeding to its clients, some of which were meatpackers and grocery chains.

  Warren Monfort studied those West Coast models and he understood the new dynamics of making beef: take stock off the range at a younger age, feed it to specifications dictated by either a meatpacker or a grocery chain, and use mechanization to slash expenses at the “beef factory,” as he called it. Monfort started the 1950s with eight thousand head of cattle, turning the stock over at least once a year so that he marketed between sixteen and twenty thousand head a year, sending cattle to market every week. By decade’s end, he owned one hundred acres of feedlots that held twenty-two thousand cattle at a time, lots designed to accommodate machinery that reduced the need for human labor.

  By that time, Warren’s son Ken had joined the family business. As a boy, Ken had worked around the farm and shown animals at livestock competitions. At Colorado State University he majored in animal nutrition, although he was more interested in writing than in farming (for years, he wrote a column for a Greeley newspaper). But his beloved older brother died during World War II, and when Warren began his great expansion, Ken left college without a degree and returned home to help. Ken Monfort was born for business. He was an imposing man. (This was in part because of his exuberant personality, but also because of his height: nearly six and a half feet tall. The company’s Japanese customers adored him: here was the Marlboro man come to life.) Like Phil Armour, he kept one eye on business and the other fixed on events national and global, contemplating the way in which, say, monsoons in India or labor strikes in Milwaukee might affect his Colorado company. He had the brain of a mathematician and an endless fascination with turning ideas and opportunities to profit. He was famous (or infamous) among friends and acquaintances for his indifference to his surroundings, known for wearing two different shoes or the same shirt many days in a row. But the chain-smoking, coffee-swilling Monfort (a small mountain of disposable cups obscured the back seat of his car) loved his work, and his ambition equaled if not exceeded that of his father. Warren Monfort had always been “a heck of an asset to the industry,” mused a cattle-feeding neighbor, but “when the young fellow came along he just went ape.”

  The Monforts operated the biggest feedlot, but theirs was just one of many new ventures that opened in the western and southern United States at midcentury. From California to Texas to Kansas, entrepreneurs ran fencing, constructed feed bunks, and outfitted trucks with mixers. In 1962, commercial feeders—defined by the USDA as feeding a thousand or more head of cattle—accounted for just a third of the fed cattle sent to slaughter. Eleven years later, two-thirds of the nation’s fed cattle came from such lots, and a mere 1 percent of feedlots put out nearly half the nation’s fed cattle. Nowhere was the boom more evident than in Texas. In 1950, Texans fed a mere quarter of a million cattle; twenty years later, they turned out 3 million. Among the Texas feeders was Paul Engler, who opened his gates in 1961 with just five thousand head and doubled his feedings in a year. (Twenty years later, he would rule as the world’s cattle king.) Engler credited location for that growth. His lots lay a few miles southwest of Amarillo, long a busy cattle market but now a depository for range cattle that, a few years earlier, would have been shipped to the Corn Belt. “I can walk into that town at any time,” said Engler, “and find the type of cattle I need.” The cattle buyer for the Swift packing plant in Fort Worth was delighted. “We used to have to ship in a lot of choice-grade carcasses from the Corn Belt to meet the consumers’ demand for meat,” he said. “Now we have choice cattle all year around [sic] fed right in this area.” The manager of the tony Amarillo Club applauded the change. For years, the steaks he sold came from Chicago;
now he could serve T-bones and fillets from animals born, raised, fed, and slaughtered nearby.

  The midcentury birth of commercial feeding operations had little to do with corn. As we’ve seen, western commercial feeders used everything from almond husks to citrus pulp to sugar beet tops. But the grain that drove feedlot expansion in the mid-twentieth century was sorghum. The grass was not new to the West and Southwest, but prior to the 1940s, it played a small role in those regions’ agriculture. That changed when federal allotment programs reduced acres that could be devoted to cotton. Western and southern farmers latched on to sorghum as a substitute, and it became the primary ingredient in feeders’ rations, its production increasing markedly after a hybrid version became available in the late 1950s. A sign at the Hillcrest Cafe in Tulia, Texas, testified to the change: “Our feature—Texas sorghum-fed top sirloin steak, $2.” “Those sirloins really move,” boasted the happy owner.

  As had been true of the California feedlot pioneers, many operators fed livestock on contract for specification buyers like meatpackers and grocery chains; those direct purchases eliminated the need for stockyards, whether in Chicago or Fort Worth. Some packers and grocers even operated their own feedlots, a tactic that allowed them to exert maximum control over the quality of beef they sold. South of Denver, for example, a grocery chain operated several mammoth feedlots and processed the animals at its nearby company-owned slaughterhouse. The number of packers that fed their own beef was small, but skewed to the West. By the mid-1960s, meatpackers fed about 7 percent of all the cattle slaughtered in the United States, but the number was higher in the West: 38 percent in Washington state and 22 in Idaho. Forty-three percent of all packer-fed cattle came from just three states: Texas, California, and Washington. Without those feedlots, said a Utah packer, he and his peers as well as regional grocery chains would have found it “impossible” to lay hands on “year-round supplies of finished animals in sufficient volume” to meet their contracts and, more important, to keep consumer prices low for shoppers.

  The movement of cattle off the range and into western feedlots was a transformative moment in American livestock production. Nowhere was the impact felt more keenly than in the midwestern Corn Belt, where, as had been true for the previous century, agriculture rested on the cattle-corn-hog complex. During the 1950s and 1960s, and even aside from the new competitors, turmoil unsettled that long-standing triad, in part because new subsidy programs for corn and other grains diminished the appeal of livestock production. Livestock feeders headed for the exit. “I’m getting out of the cattle business,” said an Iowa feeder in 1953, a man who’d been marketing about twelve thousand head a year. “I’m going to plow up my pasture, put it in corn and then sell the corn to the Government at $1.55 a bushel.” Two Nebraska feeders also decided to “dry up” their operations. “We’re going to grow about 90,000 bushels,” said one of them, and then “seal it [in a silo] and go fishing.”

  Western competition squeezed those who stayed in, as cattle that once traveled to Chicago or Kansas City stayed in the West. “No question,” sighed one Illinois feeder, “but that competition’s driving [up] prices” that he and other farmer-feeders paid for cattle. And not just prices: as Warren Monfort had expected, the temperate plains climate and westerners’ access to cheap feedstuffs gave midwesterners headaches. Monfort was right about something else: Corn Belt feeders weren’t specialists, and in the 1950s, that could be fatal. Any ten Iowa cattle (or hog) farmers gave their livestock ten different types of feed and ended up with ten lots of livestock that varied in weight, musculature, fat, and marbling. Specification buyers like Armour and Swift, Safeway and A&P weren’t interested in those grab bags. They wanted uniform cargoes of carcasses with specific ratios of lean to fat at a specific price. Commercial feeders like the Monforts obliged, exercising razor-sharp focus to achieve uniformity, providing not just more consistent beef but huge quantities of it, far more than the average Corn Belt farmer-feeder could muster.

  In 1959, an analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank offered a blunt assessment: western competition was driving “the small, one-or-two -carloads-a-year cattle feeder in the Corn Belt out of business.” A western meatpacker had little sympathy for the losers, pointing out that professionals like the Monforts focused on “only one aim and that was to produce an animal of desired quality as quickly and as economically as possible.” By comparison, Corn Belt feeding practices were “wasteful and unscientific.” Put a bit more charitably, midwesterners were nonspecialists in a specialized world. A Missouri man got the message: “As in most any business, the fellow who produces the cheapest will stay in.” If he and other Corn Belt farmers hoped to survive, they would have to reduce their costs by joining the Monforts in putting “beef feeding on a factory basis.”

  Midwestern hog farmers experienced even more turmoil in part because pork’s future looked none too bright. In a 1956 Roper poll, many interviewees described pork as “less nourishing” than beef or poultry and more fattening than both. Those polled associated beef with “athletes, bankers, [and] slim and beautiful women” and pork with “poor people, truck drivers, [and] large families.” Between that, grain subsidies, and the labor shortage, many hog farmers wanted out. A Minnesota man who abandoned hogs in favor of corn in 1958 told a reporter that as grain subsidy programs reduced the risks of crop farming, hogs became “more of a gamble.” And, he added, “When I raised hogs, I didn’t have time for anything else.” “Hog-raising is not only hard work but it’s also a year-round chore,” one made increasingly difficult by the lack of labor. “Now I’m free in the winter. Last year, we made a two-week trip to Florida and Washington.”

  But Corn Belt hog farmers also faced new competition, in their case from entrepreneurs in the southern and southeastern United States. As federal allotment programs reduced cotton and tobacco acres in the South, landowners there hunted for alternatives and many turned to hog farming. Despite the region’s historically pork-centric diet, southerners had little experience raising hogs because landowners had traditionally devoted their land to cash crops and imported pork from northern states. So when southerners turned to hogs in the 1950s and 1960s, they started from scratch and, not surprisingly, built enterprises modeled after the broiler industry. Hurdles abounded. Southerners competed against experienced Corn Belt hog farmers, and they had to ship corn in from the Midwest. On the plus side, however, were weather—hogs gain weight faster in warm climates—and in states like North Carolina, proximity to the East Coast’s metropolitan markets. As in the broiler industry, the new hog producers tended to be entrepreneurs rather than traditional farmers, and as in broiler making, they relied on contract growers and assistance from affiliated industries. Swift, for example, had taken advantage of North Carolina’s relatively cheap land and labor and built a packing plant there but had trouble buying enough hogs to keep it running at capacity. To encourage local farmers, the plant’s managers leased sows to farmers who agreed to take at least fifty of them and to sell the offspring to Swift. “Inherent in all this are the principles of the industrial production line,” explained a reporter in 1959. “The businessman at one end of the line ships out standardized pigs to farmers who’ll feed them according to a set pattern.” Regular production schedules would stabilize supplies and prices, and consumers would get “cheaper, better pork.” “This is the beginning of a revolution in swine raising,” raved a Missouri slaughterhouse owner who tried to transplant the model to his state.

  Many midwestern farmers cringed at such praise, fearing that contract farming would reduce them to the status of hired hands. But an executive with a Missouri agricultural consulting firm advised doubters to keep an open mind. “If you don’t want [outsiders] to take over your traditional product,” he said, “don’t spare the horses.” Translation: Modernize your operations.

  At least hog farmers had antibiotics to help keep costs in line. Cattle feeders had seen the results those high-tech inputs provided, and that’s why they applaud
ed a 1954 announcement from Iowa State College: Wise Burroughs, an ISC faculty member, had discovered that feeding cattle the synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol, known as DES, accelerated growth and thus lowered feed costs. At last cattle feeders had their own version of a pharmaceutical miracle worker.

  As noted earlier, the war-era search for new feedstuffs had led to the use of antibiotic-laced feeds on broiler and hog farms. But antibiotics had limited value for cattle feeders: unlike chickens and hogs, bovines have multiple stomachs and they don’t chew their food so much as they moisten it to ease its trip to the first stomach, the rumen. Those multiple stomachs also complicated scientists’ understanding of bovine nutrition. Researchers had figured out that cattle manure contained some substance—an X factor—that satisfied the nutritional needs of hogs and chickens. They also knew that the rumen harbors immense colonies of microorganisms that transform roughage into carbohydrates. Beyond, that, however, and even in the 1940s, bovine digestion and nutrition were little understood, and precisely what transpired in the rumen and the other stomachs was a mystery.