Michael Weeks, "COVID-19 and Concentrated Animal Feeding in Historical Perspective"
In an effort to engage more explicitly with the world around us, the Agricultural History Society is developing a series of short, web-based essays that will apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. Anyone with an interest in contributing, please contact Bert Way at away5@kennesaw.edu. Our first contribution was Karen-Beth Scholthof’s essay, “Environment and Disease: Lessons from Plant Pathology in the Time of COVID-19.” Today’s contribution comes from Michael Weeks, titled “COVID-19 and Concentrated Animal Feeding in Historical Perspective.”
It should be cited as: Michael Weeks, "COVID-19 and Concentrated Animal Feeding in Historical Perspective,” The Short Rows, published August 4, 2020. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/michael-weeks-covid-19-and-concentrated-animal-feeding-in-historical-perspective
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COVID-19 and Concentrated Animal Feeding in Historical Perspective
Michael Weeks
The rash of COVID-19 cases and deaths emanating from the nation’s meat processing plants is among the tragic subplots in the current pandemic. In April, a Smithfield plant in South Dakota finally closed after a cluster of over six hundred cases surfaced there. One of Smithfield’s competitors, JBS, shuttered and re-opened several beef processing plants, including one in Greeley, Colorado, where more than one hundred employees were infected and five died. The tight spaces within factory disassembly and packing lines were clear causes. Researchers have also speculated that the cold, humid air, lack of sunlight, and need for employees to shout—releasing moisture droplets into the air—contributed to the spread.
Media reports have also emphasized the politics of the pandemic, highlighted by Donald Trump’s Executive Order on April 28 to keep meat processing plants open. Citing the Korean-War era Defense Production Act, Trump argued that meat processing is “critical infrastructure during the national emergency.” News agencies have also exposed tensions between an industry that seeks an exploitable workforce and how employees have literally fought for their lives when making decisions about going to work. In an incentive program that viscerally connected the process and product of meatpacking labor, JBS offered employees at its northern Utah facility a half section of ribeye as a bonus for showing up to work.
While the tension between the capacity of meatpacking plants and human health commands attention, the current crisis has also exposed interconnected dramas playing out in the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where animals are fattened for slaughter. For chickens, cattle, and pigs packed into industrial sheds, feedlots, and pens across the country, the doors to the meatpacking plants are open for brief periods in their lifecycles and then are shut permanently. According to a May statement from the National Pork Producers’ Council President, Howard Roth, “once these animals get too big, the processing plants can no longer take them.” That has not always been the case, and understanding this and similar food-supply problems during our current crisis requires some parsing of our very recent past. [1]
During the early twentieth century, livestock intended for slaughter lived longer and gained weight more slowly than they do today. In addition, consumers were accustomed to variations in quality and taste. This gave processors and farmers alike some flexibility. If meat processing capacity declined, as in the current pandemic, livestock could be slaughtered later. By contrast, the current system is calibrated to meet a more finicky consumer palette with animals engineered to fatten rapidly and be processed within a narrow window in their lifecycles. This rigid processing model supports meat abundance and packing plant efficiency. It also places worker health and processor profits in conflict.
The current crisis in meatpacking plants is also a CAFO crisis whose roots are embedded in commercial feeding’s formative years. In cattle feeding, an essential place to witness the transformation is northern Colorado, where many of the innovations and economies of scale that are now assumed industry components were developed between 1945 and 1970. Changes in how cattle were fed, the efforts of agro-industry, evolving consumer expectations, and collaboration with land-grant colleges explain how CAFOs today operate in concert with meat processing plants and why they are flashpoints for the pandemic.[2]
Prevailing logic and circumstances prior to World War II kept cattle feedlots small and flexible. Since it was cheaper to bring feeds to cattle than the reverse, cattle feeding functioned as a side business to employ on-the-farm feeds. Consequently, cow/calf operations raised calves on pasture, then sold them to feeders who would fatten animals on their crops, then sell cattle once again to feeders in the Corn Belt who finished cattle before packing them off to the major terminal markets for slaughter and processing.[3] Since corn produces the most efficient weight gain among major grains, fattening cattle dominated the mixed farms of the Corn Belt states of Iowa and Illinois. Cattle feeding was a seasonal operation and few feeders fattened more than three hundred cattle in a season. Further, diverse operations enabled feeders to modify crop choice and cattle quantity to adjust to the market and the agro-ecology of their farms. In the early twentieth century, the lifecycle of beef cattle varied widely, but averaged around four years. Lack of standardized grading and varied consumer palettes allowed feeders flexibility as to the weight and timing of slaughter.[4]
As the Great Depression tightened its grip during the early 1930s, two Northern Colorado farmers, W. D. Farr and Warren Monfort, made a fateful decision to abandon the mixed farming and crop rotations that formed the bedrock of the region’s agriculture in favor of commercial cattle feeding. Taking advantage of an oversupply of Midwestern corn, they imported large quantities of a grain that could not yet be cultivated in quantity in Colorado, due to its shorter growing season. As their operations grew, Monfort and Farr, along with a few of their peers, penned sufficient animals to sell at various points throughout the year, enabling feeders to ride out the boom and bust cycles characteristic of the industry. Further, with animals packed into tight spaces, their land needs, relative to production, were small. By 1950, Warren Monfort could pen eight thousand cattle. Two years later, Weld County, where Monfort and Farr lived, fattened more beef than any county in the nation.[5]
The move to mono-cropping cattle is critical for understanding the current crisis. In the former system of mixed farming, farmers could adjust the amount of land devoted to raising animals. However, on feedlots such as those developed by Warren Monfort and his successors, no such land existed. If slaughterhouses shut down or slowed down, as in the current pandemic, operators such as Monfort’s would not have the flexibility to repurpose their land to accommodate the additional cattle. There was no other land. Slaughterhouse and feedlot capacity became tightly linked.
Corn hybrids drove the push for commercial feeding during the 1950s. Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University) had been performing hybrid field trials for nearly two decades before achieving results that tempted regional farmers to embrace them. Moreover, there was plenty of demand. The rapidly expanding feedlots absorbed every corn plant and kernel added to the region’s cultivation mix. Corn was also an attractive cultivar since it could be mono-cropped using new selective herbicides such as 2,4-D and atrazine. The latter obliterated weeds and rendered fields useless for other crops, making corn not just an attractive monoculture, but an herbicidal imperative. Further, replacing nutrients that corn sucked from the soil became simpler, as synthetic nitrogen became widely available. In liquid, pellets, and infused into irrigation ditches, ammonia (NH3) replaced synthetically what cattle manure supplied organically. Don Ament, former Colorado Secretary of Agriculture, and an irrigated Northern Colorado farmer with regional roots stretching back more than a hundred years, observed that two-thirds of all the cultivated plant matter in the region is processed through cattle feedlots as a result of postwar changes.[6] Corn hybrids and chemicals did not make modern feedlots; however, their low cost and minimal labor requirements made confined cattle feeding attractive.
Taking cues from the poultry and swine industries, commercial cattle feeders in the late 1940s and 1950s looked for ways to solve diseases endemic to confined cattle feeding, while boosting the efficiency of their feeds. Experiments with the antibiotics terramycin and aureomycin proved effective in reducing disease and boosting feed efficiency. Veterinarians, pharmaceutical companies, and researchers at land-grant colleges also developed several vaccinations that possessed limited effectiveness at containing a highly contagious set of viral diseases known collectively as Bovine Respiratory Disease. Then, in 1954, the FDA approved the synthetic hormone, diethylstilbestrol (DES) which, according to Iowa State Animal Science Professor, Wise Burroughs, improved feed efficiency by 35 percent and reduced feed costs by 20 percent. Though figures were inflated, within one year, 80 percent of northern Colorado feeders employed the hormone. The next decade witnessed a host of additional drugs, hormones, tranquilizers and other medicines aimed at normalizing a form of feeding that, until recently, had not existed.[7] As cattle fattened faster, the period of time during which weights synchronized with slaughter tightened.
How did this occur so rapidly? Here, the example of DES is instructive. When Wise Burroughs began testing DES in the early 1950s, W. D. Farr was among several feeders who agreed to offer his feedlot as a laboratory. When initial tests showed cattle gaining more weight on less feed, Burroughs and Iowa State signed an agreement with the pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly, to manufacture the hormone. Thus, when the FDA approved the drug, Lilly was poised to market Stilbosol, and Farr’s endorsement became an advertising tool. In the meantime, universities such as Colorado A&M signed lucrative deals with Eli Lilly to conduct hormone field trials.[8]
Cattle feeders’ organizations also wielded influence over the transformation. In 1955, Colorado feeders formed the Northern Colorado Cattle Feeders’ Association (CCFA). That year, CCFA signed an agreement with Colorado A&M that granted the association some oversight over cattle–feeding research projects, facilities, and personnel. CCFA also signed deals with pharmaceutical companies to obtain feedlot drugs at wholesale prices, passing along the discounts to its members. Additionally, CCFA’s members exercised hiring oversight. In 1961, when Colorado A&M sought a new professor of animal sciences to oversee its cattle feeding program, CCFA selected John Matsushima from the University of Nebraska and agreed to pay for his cattle and graduate students to move to Colorado. They even negotiated his contract details. When I interviewed Matsushima in 2018, he described his faculty interview as a mere formality, attended by more cattle feeders than university personnel.[9]
The networks established between agro-industry, feeders, and agricultural colleges also explain much about the culture of fattening cattle. Here again, W. D. Farr is instructive. His connections with agricultural colleges, pharmaceutical companies, and peers gave him a platform to influence industry direction. During the 1950s and 1960s, he was a guest speaker at fairs, feeder conferences, and colleges, while a steady stream of colleagues visited his operations in Greeley. Farr’s message was consistent: buy young and light cattle, employ the most efficient feeds available, use every feed additive that will fatten cattle quickly to the desired USDA grade, expand your operations, and sell cattle for slaughter at light weights, usually between 1,100 and 1,200 pounds. Farr told feeders to cease thinking of themselves as farmers and ranchers and their cattle as animals. Rather, feedlots were factories that “manufactured beef.” Farr’s message both influenced and mapped onto trends already occurring. By the mid-1960s, feeders purchased yearling cattle and aimed for a feeding period of about five months, during which animals would gain an average of four hundred pounds. The efforts of researchers, feeders and their organizations, agro-industry, and agricultural colleges shrank the lives of beef cattle from four years to just over two years, thereby constricting even further the timeframe during which animals could be processed.[10]
Consumer preferences also played a critical role in feedlot and meat packing operations. As beef became common and affordable with the growth of confined feeding and rising incomes after World War II, so consumers demanded a uniform product. One venue where the new meat-eating paradigm was most visible during the late 1960s was the National Western Stock Show in Denver. Among John Matsushima’s first initiatives was a new contest at the Stock Show called the Fed Beef Contest. Unlike other livestock shows, this one evaluated animals only after they were slaughtered and placed in coolers. Judges rated carcasses on yield grade—also called cutability—which was a measure of the percent of retail yield for the chuck, rib, round, and loin portions of the beef. Animals were also evaluated on whether they attained the USDA Choice grade. While only the second highest beef grade (Prime was the highest), Choice was desired by consumers due to the combination of affordability and thin layers of intramuscular fat throughout the meat—a quality obtained through feeding corn. Feeders and casual observers of the Fed Beef Contest watched from behind plate glass where judges announced the winners. Meanwhile, volunteers—often animal science graduate students—explained why corn feeding and slaughter at a young age led to the lean and tender beef they desired. The Fed Beef Contest was both a microcosm of the cultural and economic transformations in cattle feeding as well as a driver of the changes it displayed.[11] It also supported the imperative to slaughter and process cattle during a very narrow window in their lifecycles.
The feedlots of Warren Monfort represent a full articulation of the new imperative. By 1968, the pioneering feeder operated the world’s largest operation, with a capacity of one hundred thousand cattle, and another under construction. Monfort contracted with most farmers within a twelve-mile radius to supply all of his corn silage, while maintaining multiple silos in the Midwest to store the company’s feed corn. Monfort employed computer specialists and a full-time nutritionist to mix and deliver feeds and supplements. The lifecycle of Monfort’s steers, who lived out most of their final months in a one-acre pen surrounded by four hundred fifty of their peers, imitated the assembly lines of the meatpacking plants where they would be processed. From vaccinations, to penning, feeding, feedlot drugs, and the final death march (Monfort opened an on-site slaughterhouse in 1960), all was scripted. Then, in 1965, Warren Monfort’s son, Kenny, added meat fabrication operations to the company’s processing operations, enabling it to pack loads of boxed beef into Monfort’s fleet of trucks.[12] It was an efficient beef manufacturing operation whereby a five-month period of fattening synchronized with processing capacity and consumer demand.
Commercial cattle feeding has changed little since 1970. Corn grain and silage remain the dominant feeds, along with roughages and various supplements, including growth hormones to replace the now-banned DES. The admonitions of W. D. Farr to view feeding as manufacturing and cattle as beef are industry mantras. Cattle lifecycles are engineered to synchronize with meat processing facilities and a public that demands a uniformly consistent product. Consequently, when Howard Roth claims that meat processing plants can no longer process animals beyond a certain age, he is not just making a statement about the present structure of meat processing plants, but about the history of the CAFOs who make his industry possible.
The meat processing plants of today—whether they process pork, chicken, beef, or another animal—are not self-contained operations. They rely on a steady and predictable stream of animals that humans engineered to supply the American diet with large quantities of cheap protein. As with other manufacturing operations, timelines are tight and profits are narrow. Disruptions in the supply chain can idle or overwhelm factories. Except, in the case of meatpacking plants, the supply consists of living animals with expiration dates, as determined by industry and consumers.
The COVID-19 pandemic unhinged all of the interconnected moving parts of industrial meat. CAFOs fattened animals with an expectation of sufficient slaughtering capacity. Companies that supply the capacity, such as JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, and Cargill, profit from processing animals within a very specific window in their lifecycles. However, by operating at full capacity—or even operating at all—they endanger the lives of workers whose daily tasks place them at risk of contracting the virus. The ongoing crisis over the spread of COVID-19 in meat processing plants is inseparable from the history of engineering livestock for human consumption.
Michael Weeks is a lecturer in the history department at Utah Valley University where he teaches courses on US and environmental history, as well as the American West. This article draws on research from his book manuscript, Industrializing a Landscape: Colorado and the Making of Agriculture in the Twentieth Century.
NOTES
[1]. Examples used in the first three paragraphs were pulled from the following articles: “Why Meat Processing Plants have become Covid-19 Hotbeds,” CNN.com, June 27, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/27/health/meat-processing-plants-coronavirus-intl/index.html; Hollie Silverman, “More than 370 Workers at a Pork Plant in Missouri Tested Positive for Coronavirus. All were Asymptomatic,” CNN, May 4, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/us/triumph-foods-outbreak-missouri/index.html; Sarah Westwood, “Despite Trump Executive Order, Meat-Processing Plants Struggle to Stay Open,” CNN, May 1, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/politics/executive-order-meat-processing-plants-open/index.html; Ana Swanson and David Yaffe-Bellany, “Trump Declares Meat Supply ‘Critical,’ Aiming to Reopen Plants,” New York Times, April 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/business/economy/coronavirus-trump-meat-food-supply.html; Nate Carlisle and Kathy Stephenson, “287 Workers Test Positive for COVID-19 At Meatpacking Plant as Impact Ripples through Northern Utah,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 8, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/08/cache-valley-providing/.
[2]. William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 631–64.
[3]. Circumstances determined whether cattle were sent from pasture to an initial set of feeders, or directly to feeders in the Corn Belt. On the development of this system, see James W. Whitaker, Feedlot Empire: Beef Cattle Feeding in Illinois and Iowa, 1840–1900 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975).
[4]. Jimmy M. Skaggs, Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607–1983, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 130–67; John Fraser Hart, The Changing Scale of American Agriculture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 41–61.
[5]. W. D. Farr, “Speech at the Billings Farmers Institute,” February 14, 1952, Box 1, W. D. Farr Collections, Water Resource Archives, Morgan Library, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado (Hereafter CAC Water Resource Archive).
[6]. Don Ament, June 23, 2019, Interview by author.
[7]. Terry G. Summons, “Animal Feed Additives, 1940–1966,” Agricultural History 42, no. 4 (1968): 305–13; Alan I Marcus, Cancer from Beef: DES, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 61–82.
[8]. William R. Farr, July 5, 2019, Interview by author.
[9]. Over the Feed Bunk, November 1955, July 1956, August 1957, and September 1957. (Denver: Colorado Cattle Feeders Association); see also John K. Matsushima, A Journey Back: A History of Cattle Feeding in Colorado and the United States (Colorado Springs: Cattlemen’s Communications, 1995); John Matsushima, June 28, 2018, Interview by author.
[10]. W. D. Farr, “Cattle Feeding a Dynamic Industry,” January 1969, Speech at Michigan State University and “Ceneca International Symposium,” Paris, March 1967, Farr Collection, Box 1, Farr Cattle Talks, 1951–1986, CAC Water Archives.
[11]. Chuck Sylvester, June 20, 2019, Interview by author.
[12]. Lawrence Mayer, “A One-Company Industry,” Fortune, January 1973, Vol. 87.