In Meat We Trust (22 page)

In the years just after the war, Americans explored confinement’s possibilities, building on studies like those conducted at ISC but also borrowing ideas from European farmers, many of whom had long coped with lack of land and labor by confining their livestock. By the late 1950s, many American farmers, especially hog growers, had moved beyond the initial confinement concept of paved surface plus fencing and carried the idea to its logical conclusion: moving swine not just off pasture but completely indoors, using heating, cooling, and ventilation technologies to replicate ideal outdoor conditions. Confinement protected animals from predators and weather and enabled livestock producers to automate feeding and to exercise complete control over animals’ diets, something that was impossible when livestock ran on pasture.

Those who took the plunge regarded the money as well spent. Two Indiana brothers
who moved their cattle from pasture to confinement reduced per-head feeding time from four hours to just fourteen minutes a day, and cleanup from three hours to twenty-four minutes. That in turn enabled them to increase the number of cattle they fed from 82 to 257. A South Dakota man raved about his neighbor’s confinement operation. “He’s got what I call
a beef factory for the 60s!” said the man. “Slickest set-up I ever saw.” He just “pushes a few buttons and feeds 300 head in 20 to 30 minutes.” Thanks to that equipment, the penned animals ate a “complete ration” of “silage, corn, protein pellets, [and] molasses,” all of it so thoroughly mixed that “every mouthful a steer [ate was] alike,” a crucial benefit given that meatpackers and grocery chains demanded animals with specific carcass attributes. The owner confirmed that he was pleased by the switch from pasture to confinement. “You should have been here last winter to appreciate fully what it means,” he told a reporter. Multiple storms dumped a “17-inch snow pack on the ground.” While his neighbors’ cattle lost weight trying to navigate the treacherous terrain, his enjoyed “good gains.” Indeed, confinement mitigated the role of climate and enabled Corn Belt farmers to compete with year-round feeders like the Monforts. “We were getting killed
selling twice a year,” said an Iowan who moved his cattle into confinement. “Now we’re marketing every month, averaging the ups and downs, and making money.” A Michigan farmer was blunt about what drove him to invest in confinement: “I can’t afford
to pasture cattle on high-priced Corn Belt land.” From the 1950s on, and even in the relatively rural Midwest, urban sprawl and burgeoning networks of highways and interstates gobbled agricultural acres and pushed land prices into the stratosphere. Many farmers sold their holdings to developers, but those who did not were forced to farm intensively rather than extensively. Pasture grazing had always imposed an upper limit on the number of animals the grasses could feed, but with confinement, farmers could increase herd size on a small parcel of land, allowing them to turn what had been pasture to other uses, such as planting grain crops.

Hog farmers were even more enthusiastic about confinement. Consider an Illinois man who marketed about seven hundred head a year, feeding them with corn he grew. In the late 1950s, he sat down and reconsidered. “I analyzed my work schedule,”
he said, “and found that raising corn brought me in only 10 per cent of my income, but took 50 per cent of my time. That was the turning-point of my farming career.” He rented his corn acres to another farmer, increased his hog herd, and invested in automated augers that carried feed from bins to mixing floor to hog pens. By 1960, he’d upped his output to seventeen hundred head and was aiming for two thousand. “With 700 hogs, my gross ran about $30,000,” he mused, and he’d “had to work as long and as hard as any farmer.” By “modernizing,” he doubled his gross and “with far less work.” Confinement benefited hog farmers in two other ways. First, it helped them reduce the otherwise high mortality rates that cut into profits. An Iowa farmer
learned that. Year after year, his pasture-based swine suffered dysentery. In the early 1950s, he adopted antibiotic-laced feeds in hopes of reducing disease-related mortality, but the drugs made no difference because, an agent from Iowa State College explained, the soil in his pasture teemed with parasites and bacteria. Moving the hogs indoors significantly reduced his losses from disease. Second, confinement protected hog farmers’ investments in expensive breeding stock. As grocers and meatpackers became increasingly specific in their demands, many midcentury farmers replaced older stock with breeds engineered to produce leaner hogs, and some invested in “Specific Pathogen-Free” stock: animals bred and born in sterile environments. Having invested their money, farmers were loath to let the animals run free. Confinement also enhanced
the possibilities of specialization. A Wisconsin hog farmer decided that instead of raising hogs from birth to market, he would focus on inseminating and farrowing sows, selling the offspring—“feeder pigs”—to farmers who only wanted to feed for market. Because he conducted his new operation entirely indoors, he could breed his sows more often and sell feeder pigs year-round. Demand was so high that he contracted with other farmers to produce feeders for him. Another Corn Belt family—a father, two sons, and a son-in-law—also shifted to confinement as a way to streamline their hog farm. One family member specialized in breeding, another in farrowing; a third finished the hogs for market; and the fourth stayed in the farm’s office, keeping the books and arranging sales. Mimicking the division of labor found in a factory or corporation, they argued, enhanced their profits and protected them in the market.

Land grant faculty and USDA officials urged midwestern feeders to specialize and invest in confinement to reduce costs and hone their competitive edge. Packers and feed dealers who wanted Corn Belt producers to stay in the game supported the new technologies, too. A Kansas City feed manufacturer contracted with packers on one side, and hog farmers on the other, preselling the farmers’ hogs to the packers. The manufacturer provided “technical assistance”
to farmers who agreed to use its feed and raise hogs according to contracts that stipulated every detail, from feed formula to breeding stock to the design of breeding pens and farrowing huts. Another midwestern feed company rented boars, sows, and gilts (young females that have not yet reproduced) to Corn Belt farmers. The farmers bought feed from the manufacturer and paid swine “rent” only after they’d marketed their animals, often for a premium and on contract, to packing companies that regarded those hogs as higher quality than those from conventional farms.

Assistance like that eased the pain of the transition from conventional to factory farming, but more was involved than simply a fatter bank account. An Illinois man who moved his hogs into confinement reported that he’d reduced his labor by half even as he doubled his output. “You don’t have to go
to confinement feeding and slats to stay in the hog business, but it surely takes a lot of the drudgery out of raising hogs!” he said. His two sons applauded the move: both were in college; both planned to come back to the farm; neither wanted the “drudgery” of old-fashioned farming. One man reported that new-style confined hog farming required “more power, more interest,
and more insurance. The tax assessor was there before the roof was even on.” But he had no desire to go back to the past: he was making more money, but as important, his operation was easier to manage and more comfortable for him and the animals. “It boils down to
our being able to take better care of more total cattle with less labor,” said another Iowan. “At the same time, the cattle are doing better. How can we go wrong?”

Make no mistake: farmers who wanted to ease their workloads weren’t lazy; they were realistic. No one believed that the labor shortage would end, and even hands who could be persuaded to get on board weren’t interested in the sunup-to-sundown, seven-day weeks of the past. Many people believed that confinement would lure a younger generation of farmers. Confinement did not cure all ills, and no one expected it to do so. But for many, it was a welcome departure from the past.

But confinement also forced livestock producers to contemplate what had once been deposited on pastures: manure. “You need some kind
of manure handling system,” mused an Indiana man, “or it’ll drive you nuts.” In the fifties, most farmers trying to incorporate confinement into their operations used a tractor and blade to push the stuff to one side and, when the pile warranted, loaded it onto a truck bed and either spread it on fields or sold it as fertilizer. Others borrowed a European solution: they hosed solids and “float[ed]”
them into a nearby pit, pumping the goop into a tank every few weeks and hauling it to a field.

But in the early 1960s, a new idea swept the countryside. The manure “lagoon” was promoted by Ralph Ricketts, an agricultural engineer at the University of Missouri. During the course of his research, he discovered that ordinary pond bacteria could digest and thus eliminate hog wastes, leaving “hardly a whiff
of foul odor, flies, or even sediment.” The use of lagoons to capture and transform manure spread quickly from Missouri to other states. When two
Farm Journal
reporters investigated in 1962, they found more than two hundred hog-farm lagoons in Missouri, and dozens more elsewhere, from Pennsylvania to Illinois, from Kentucky to Utah to California. In that last state, a chicken farmer built a lagoon after neighbors complained about flies and odor. The five-foot-deep pit occupied an acre of his land, and thanks to it, he said, his problems (and his neighbors’) were over. “County health officials
came by once after I finished it,” he reported. “They haven’t been back since.” When a Kansas hog farmer wanted to water his fields, he “just pull[ed] the plug”
and his lagoon’s contents drained into an irrigation ditch below. “Works perfectly,” he said.

Not everyone was convinced. “How stupid
can you folks get, anyway?” asked a reader of one farm magazine. Why would anyone “dump manure into lagoons, and thereby destroy organic matter, rather than put it back into the soil?” he asked. “Lagoons, the magic way to get rid of manure? Better say: Lagoons, the magic way to poverty!” “You can call it a lagoon
if you like,” groused another man. “For my money, it was an open, stinking, septic tank. Nobody would go near it.” By the mid-sixties even enthusiasts were questioning the magic, in part because it was clear that a successful lagoon (although plenty of people regarded that idea as an oxymoron) required more land than most farmers were willing to sacrifice. An employee of the U.S. Public Health Service calculated that an anaerobic lagoon required seventy-eight cubic feet per hog, and a truly odor-free pit required nine acres per thousand hogs. Even then, warned a reporter, lagoon operators “faced all the problems
of a sanitary engineer operating a sewage works for a town of 1,000 people, without the engineer’s training and staff.”

Ironically, in the 1960s, the greatest resistance to confinement came not from farmers or their rural neighbors but from city folks as urban growth narrowed the geographical divide between town and country and urbanites got a whiff of modern farming. A reporter who investigated manure odor litigation in 1965 found that nearly all the complaints lodged against farmers came from residents of new housing developments. “You’ve got a stick
of dynamite in your hands if enough people living near you decide they don’t like your barnlot smells,” warned a reporter for one farm magazine. “They can close you up!” “It’s the number of animals being kept in one place that’s doing it,” said an official with the Illinois Department of Public Health. But as another observer mused, farmers were “caught in the middle”:
consumers “demand[ed] more red meat” even as they insisted on “less pollution from its production.”

Ken Monfort was one of those caught in the middle. For years, the family had collected liquid runoff and used it for irrigation or sold it to local farmers. But in the 1960s, some Greeley residents complained that wasn’t enough and that the Monforts’ considerable contribution to the local economy was outweighed by the nuisance their operation created. The matter came to a head late in the decade when Ken proposed building a 125,000-head feedlot south of town. A group of homeowners near the site organized opposition to the plan, and the spokesman for “Operation Fresh Air” argued that feedlots had become a drag on Greeley’s economy. “If you were [an employer]
and you wanted to come to Colorado and the clean, Western fresh air, would you locate in Greeley between two feed lots?” he asked. A city councilman agreed. Whenever visitors came to town, he said, “they invariably inquire [about] the strange odor” and ask “how do you stand it.” The editor of one local newspaper sided with the Monforts, pointing out that in the previous year, the company had purchased $2.5 million worth of feedstuffs from area farmers, and that property taxes on the new lot would contribute almost a half-million dollars to local revenues. Unsure how deep the opposition ran, Ken Monfort announced that he would abandon the project. That prompted an outpouring of support in favor of the expansion and he decided to proceed, but as a concession, he closed his father’s original feedlot and built a second new one farther from town.

The problems of manure management and urban opposition raise an obvious question: Why didn’t government officials—city, state, or federal—ban confinement operations? The answer is deliciously ironic: in the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans, and especially environmental policymakers, regarded confinement as an efficient method of pollution control and as environmentally superior to conventional pasture grazing. In the 1960s new concerns about air, water, and soil pollution prompted Congress to pass a series of environmental laws. Among those was a bill that required the states to establish pollution standards; state governments, in turn, ordered polluters, including farmers, to add antipollution measures to their operations, and in many states, livestock feeders were required to develop waste-management technologies. All of it pointed toward confinement as the best way to manage and control wastes. An Ohio State University professor of environmental engineering told a reporter that thanks to environmental regulations, there was “no question
but that a lot of the livestock industry is ultimately going to have to go to enclosed systems.”