In Meat We Trust (19 page)

The Monfort feedlot is another example of the factory farming ideal. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the proliferation of such operations—the Monforts’ was the nation’s largest, but it was just one of many—were driven by many factors: soaring demand for beef, which strained the capacity of the western range; the emergence of the “hotel, restaurant, institutional” food industry; and population growth in the western United States. In the years just after World War II, these factors inspired farmers and entrepreneurs to invent new modes of raising not just cattle but hogs, too. As in the broiler industry, these livestock systems embraced large scale, confinement, and the use of drug-laced feeds. But in cattle and hog production, innovations came primarily from traditional farmers working in conjunction with land grant schools; only later did large outside corporations commandeer the model. A half-century later, that midcentury version of livestock production still stands—and has become a target of considerable criticism—so it’s important that we understand how and why these changes took place. There is no better way to do so than by tracing the history of the Monfort family’s beef empire.

Warren Monfort was an unlikely cattle king. In the early twentieth century, his parents migrated from Illinois to Weld County in northern Colorado, where they bought a farm just a few miles from Greeley. Warren attended college there and worked briefly as a high school teacher. But the classroom wasn’t enough to satisfy his ambition, and by 1919, he was back at his parents’ farm with his new wife. He focused first on raising sheep, a common source of agricultural income in Colorado, but in the mid-1920s, he made a risky but ultimately profitable decision: he would feed cattle.

Historically, cattle feeding had been the domain of the Corn Belt. Farmers there bought western, grass-fed range cattle and “finished” the livestock for market by feeding the stock a corn-rich diet, a practice that yielded “Prime” beef marbled with fat and endowed with a toothsome richness that grass feeding rarely provides. Those feeders bought their stock from ranchers in Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, and other western states, men and women who specialized in raising young stock on grass for about two years before selling their herds either directly to packers or to Corn Belt feeders.

But during the agricultural crisis of the 1920s, faculty at Colorado’s land grant school, what was then Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University), and its affiliated experiment station urged local ranchers to diversify into feeding. They pointed out that motorized trucks and networks of paved roads had given Coloradans better access to urban markets like Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, where consumers otherwise relied on beef shipped in from the Corn Belt. Why not give those Corn Belt farmers some competition? They also noted
that although Coloradans produced little corn, there was an alternative: at the time, one of the major industries in Weld County and northern Colorado was sugar manufacture, an industry that relied on locally grown sugar beets and that generated mounds of waste in the form of beet tops and pulp; tests at CAC’s experiment station indicated that cattle thrived on it.

Warren wanted to give feeding a try even though his father, Charles, opposed the project. Like most Colorado farmers, the elder Monfort grazed a few cattle, but he couldn’t see the point of wasting time or labor on them. But when Charles died in 1930, the younger Monfort faced a choice: sell what had been, thanks to his father’s lackadaisical management, a mostly failed farm (“During the 20s
we thought we would go under about every year, but somehow we managed to hang on,” Warren said later), or find a way to turn the eighty acres to profit. Warren decided to keep the land and try his hand at feeding, calculating that he’d be able to compete with more experienced Corn Belt feeders. At the time, those midwestern farmers typically practiced what agricultural economists called “in/out” feeding: When corn prices were low, they bought cattle and fed them grain, gambling they could make more money from cattle than from corn. When grain prices were high, they bought fewer cattle, or none at all, and sold their corn for cash. Put another way, feeding was a sideline to the main project of raising corn. Feeders were more interested in unloading cheap grain than in making high-quality beef, and so the meat’s quality varied widely. Monfort also knew that Corn Belt farmer-feeders dumped their fed stock on the market at the same time in the fall, which produced a temporary glut that lowered the price they got for their cattle.

Monfort envisioned a number of ways to compete. Cattle gain weight more quickly in warm weather than in cold, and during snowy winters and wet springs they lose weight because they burn energy trying to keep their footing. The climate in Weld County, however, was more temperate than that of the Midwest; northern Colorado boasted mild, dry winters and relatively cool summers. His cattle could gain weight more consistently and he could feed and market them year-round, most importantly during those months when there were no midwestern cattle available. He had access to alfalfa, beet tops, and pulp, which, unlike corn, had little value other than as feed; that would allow him to compete on price. Finally, because he planned to specialize in feeding, he could focus on quality rather than quantity. Still, the project was risky, not least because Corn Belt farmers had dominated the finished-beef market since the 1860s; Monfort would have to convince packers that he could offer a product as good as or better than his competitors’. But he thrived on risk—others described him as an “aggressive”
businessman—and so why not?

By the end
of the brutal 1930s, cattle had paid off the farm’s mortgage and Monfort had persuaded local bankers that he was a candidate for more credit. Wartime demand offered an opportunity for expansion, and by the early forties he was sending three thousand head a year—a remarkable number of cattle—to a single buyer, a national grocery chain. He maintained his focus on quality, which allowed him to compete where it mattered most: at the Chicago stockyards, where he earned a reputation for shipping cattle that consistently yielded Prime beef, stock that rivaled, and often exceeded, anything sent to market by his Corn Belt competitors. During the 1940s, he also expanded his repertoire of feedstuffs and built networks of suppliers. He shipped shelled corn in from the Midwest, but he also contracted with farmers nearby to grow corn silage, feed composed of the entire corn plant—kernels, cobs, leaves, and stalks—chopped fine. Monfort provided his growers with hybrid seed and sold them, at cost, fertilizer that he bought in bulk. When it was time to make silage, Monfort’s employees showed up with Monfort equipment and cut and chopped the crop, hauling it to storage pits near the feedlots.

But as the forties wound to a close, Warren Monfort sensed that change lay ahead. He believed that beef consumption was about to rise but that the Prime-grade product on which he’d built his reputation would decline in popularity. If so, he said, his future success would depend on using “a slightly lower grade
cattle” that yielded a lesser cut of beef “that would appeal to the tastes and the pocket books of the general public.” He was right on both counts. Historically, Americans have eaten more beef as their incomes rise, and in the 1940s and 1950s, the thriving economy drove incomes up even as prices for all foods remained low. During the 1940s, despite the constraints of war, ongoing rationing, and “meatless Mondays,” the nation’s appetite for beef rose ten pounds per capita. In the 1950s, it jumped another ten pounds, and during the 1960s, another twenty. There were more meat eaters to feed as well: the nation’s population rose by almost 20 million during the 1940s, and another 50 million from 1950 to 1970. The ascendance of King Beef fostered midcentury clichés: suburbanites grilling burgers at backyard barbecues, and white-collar workers feasting on three-martini lunches punctuated with steak. But Americans did not live by fresh beef alone. More than ever, convenience mattered, and sales of canned beef goods soared. “Our products are like cake mixes
and canned soup,” explained a happy purveyor. “They’re selling well because housewives are looking for quick, easy ways to fix food.” Canned beef stew or corned beef hash, tamales and chili, and “sandwich steaks” (precooked steak slices ready to meet bread) offered a harried housewife an easy way to get a meal on the table. When the family tired of beef stew, Mom could turn to Kri-Pi, a prepackaged meat pie sold in two cans taped together to make a single package, dough in one can, “meat, vegetables and gravy”
in the other. The nation’s millions of “war babies” (or, as we now call them, baby boomers) feasted on canned strained beef and other beef-based commercial baby food; in the early 1950s, Swift alone sold thirteen meat-based baby foods. Canned meat products were inexpensive, too, because they were manufactured from the lowest grades of grass-fed beef, tough, stringy stuff that is most tasty when cooked for long periods and paired with other ingredients and spices. Perfect for Chef Boyardee spaghetti in meat sauce.

Even as record numbers of Americans downed record amounts of beef, they turned their backs on expensive Prime cuts. The nation’s longtime obsession with weight watching had fallen off during the hard times of the Depression and wartime rationing, but in postwar America,
calorie counting became the national sport it remains today; grocery shelves sagged under the heft of artificial sweeteners, weight-loss aids, and low-calorie beer. Prime beef with its high fat content lost its appeal. But so, too, did its high price: buyers for the grocery chains quickly learned that Americans, true to form, demanded not just lots of meat, and good meat, but meat at a low price. They wanted “Choice” grade, which, like Prime, came from grain-fed stock but contained less fat than its higher-grade cousin.

Shoppers and grocery chains weren’t the only ones demanding the step down from Prime. By the late 1940s, Warren Monfort and other cattle feeders were accommodating a new power player: the burgeoning hotel, restaurant, and institutional industry. The HRI behemoth, ubiquitous now, is primarily a product of the mid-twentieth century. Ongoing military operations, first in World War II, then in Korea, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, fueled the growth of the armed services and the bureaucracy that supported them (the food service at the Pentagon, built during World War II, dished up thousands of meals a day). The baby boom fueled another kind of growth as children filed first into school lunchrooms and then into university and college dining halls. Americans funneled record amounts of money into medical research, and hospitals and affiliated health care enterprises proliferated, as did their food services. Hotel chains that offered restaurant service flourished as an affluent society spent more of its disposable income on travel for both business and leisure. HRI included federal and state prisons, airports and airplanes, corporate and factory cafeterias. All of it added up to an immense demand for food, especially beef, served outside the home. In the mid-1960s, one Chicago purveyor packaged a staggering 3 million hamburgers a day for its HRI customers, mostly schools and hospitals.

The “R” part of the HRI equation accounted for a significant chunk of demand. Prior to midcentury, restaurants primarily catered to the well-to-do at one end and urban workers on a budget at the other. But in postwar America, consumer demand spawned a collection of chain enterprises aimed at every conceivable market niche, not least of which was the one devoted to supplying a busy nation with “fast” food, an industry segment that grew 79 percent in the second half of the 1960s alone. By the mid-sixties, Americans could choose from over four hundred fast-food chains; the two hundred largest of those operated more than forty thousand outlets. McDonald’s grew from one shop in 1955 to 228 just five years later. Over the next decade, founder Ray Kroc opened new shops at a rate of a hundred a year. By 1970, the company was the sixth-largest food server in the United States, after the army, the USDA, the navy, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Marriott. But McDonald’s was not alone. The much smaller Mr. Steak chain, for instance, dished up 150,000 steaks a week, all of which had to look and weigh the same. What linked these new food outposts (and by the sixties, Americans were eating a third of their beef someplace other than at home) was their need to cater to a mass audience, and that audience wanted Choice or Good beef, not Prime. Cattle feeders like Monfort had to adapt or die.

Given these changes, we might assume that demand for grain-fed beef declined. After all, feeding cattle to Choice grade rather than Prime required less grain, not more, and canned meat products came from grass-fed stock. But consider these numbers:
In 1950, 47 percent of the beef Americans ate came from “fed” cattle. By 1968, that number had risen to 71 percent (and held steady for the rest of the century). The explanation for this apparent conundrum lay out on the western range. It could no longer support the number of cattle needed to meet demand. “Just to raise the calves
we buy every year [to feed] requires an area the size of Delaware,” said Warren Monfort in 1952, and as he and every other cattleman knew, the nation’s supply of grazing acres was shrinking even as beef demand rose. In the fifteen years after 1935, 9 million acres of federal grazing lands were closed or shifted to other uses. The Pentagon, for example, commandeered thousands of acres for use as airfields, bases, and weapons testing grounds. All that military development and affiliated industry attracted workers who needed housing, and New Deal projects like the Grand Coulee Dam encouraged landowners to use once-arid soil for crop farming rather than grazing. Planted fields and suburban houses flourished where cattle once roamed. All told, 45 million acres of the western range were removed from grazing during the 1930s and 1940s.

Nor did Monfort
and other ranchers believe that the number of available acres would grow anytime soon. Federal officials had dumped money into reseeding projects aimed at increasing range capacity, but there was no guarantee that even those acres would be available in the future, thanks to a bitter, ongoing conflict between Washington bureaucrats and western grazers. Ever since the cattle disaster of the 1880s, federal authorities had monitored ranchers’ use of the range and in the early twentieth century began requiring them to pay a (minuscule) fee for their access to it. Ranchers did not own the property outright, but many behaved as if they did, and relations between federal bureaucrats and cattle and sheep growers were contentious, to say the least. Many officials believed that ranchers should not use the land at all but, if they did, ought to pay more for the privilege. Most ranchers disagreed. As far as they were concerned, their use amounted to ownership. Over the years, tensions between the two sides routinely flared, died down, flared anew, and faded again. But in 1934, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act; the law, which most ranchers supported, set aside 142 million acres for grazing, established a collection of grazing districts, and granted administrative control over them to ranchers. Unfortunately, the new law also sparked a ferocious turf war in Washington, as the officials charged with managing public lands sought to exercise greater control over them, especially the acres devoted to grazing. That conflict in turn alarmed many ranchers, who, fearing they would lose their rights, abandoned support for the Taylor Act and urged Congress to turn the range over to the states.