Power Steer
By MICHAEL POLLAN
March 31, 2002
Garden City, Kan., missed out on the suburban building boom
of the postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling
subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots -- the nation's first --
began rising on the high plains of western Kansas in the 50's,
and by now developments catering to cows are far more common
here than developments catering to people.
You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads
when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and
geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as
the eye can see -- which in Kansas is really far. I say
''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma
whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than
cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more
than a mile. Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders, population
37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150
animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it
eventually dawns on you isn't mud at all. The pens line a
network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on
their way to the feedlot's beating heart: a chugging, silvery
feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this
teeming metropolis of meat.
I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly
improbable notion of visiting one particular resident: a young
black steer that I'd met in the fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D.
The steer, in fact, belonged to me. I'd purchased him as an
8-month-old calf from the Blair brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598.
I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board and
meds and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was fattened.
My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however,
or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from
the Kansas packing plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an
appointment with the stunner in June. No, my primary interest in
this animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a modern,
industrial steak is produced in America these days, from
insemination to slaughter.
Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has
become problematic in recent years. Though beef consumption
spiked upward during the flush 90's, the longer-term trend is
down, and many people will tell you they no longer eat the
stuff. Inevitably they'll bring up mad-cow disease (and the
accompanying revelation that industrial agriculture has
transformed these ruminants into carnivores -- indeed, into
cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E. coli
contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the
many environmental problems, like groundwater pollution,
associated with ''Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.'' (The
word ''farm'' no longer applies.) And of course there are
questions of animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we
eat while they're alive, and then how humanely are we
''dispatching'' them, to borrow an industry euphemism?
Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the
shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair's writing of ''The
Jungle,'' by questions about what we're really eating when we
eat meat. Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred
strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the
industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its
origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to
feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to
continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as
to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible
but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we
eat. I'd try to own it, in other words.
So this is the biography of my cow.
The Blair brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass
prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the
shadow of Bear Butte. In November, when I visited, the turf
forms a luxuriant pelt of grass oscillating yellow and gold in
the constant wind and sprinkled with perambulating black dots:
Angus cows and calves grazing.
Ed and Rich Blair run what's called a ''cow-calf'' operation,
the first stage of beef production, and the stage least changed
by the modern industrialization of meat. While the pork and
chicken industries have consolidated the entire life cycles of
those animals under a single roof, beef cattle are still born on
thousands of independently owned ranches. Although four giant
meatpacking companies (Tyson's subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel
and National) now slaughter and market more than 80 percent of
the beef cattle born in this country, that concentration
represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as
the great plains.
The Blairs have been in the cattle business for four
generations. Although there are new wrinkles to the process --
artificial insemination to improve genetics, for example --
producing beef calves goes pretty much as it always has, just
faster. Calving season begins in late winter, a succession of
subzero nights spent yanking breeched babies out of their
bellowing mothers. In April comes the first spring roundup to
work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination, castration);
then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the cows ($15
mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put the
resident stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes
well, your herd of 850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end
of the year.
My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures
alongside his mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered
Angus named GAR Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the
size and marbling of his offspring's rib-eye steaks. Born last
March 13 in a birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned
out on pasture with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf
stood up and began nursing. After a few weeks, the calf began
supplementing his mother's milk by nibbling on a salad bar of
mostly native grasses: western wheatgrass, little bluestem,
green needlegrass.
Apart from the trauma of the April day when he was branded
and castrated, you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on
those six months grazing at his mother's side as the good old
days -- if, that is, cows do look back. (''They do not know what
is meant by yesterday or today,'' Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,
with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, ''fettered to the moment
and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or
bored.'' Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.) It may be
foolish to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can
say that a cow grazing on grass is at least doing what he has
been splendidly molded by evolution to do. Which isn't a bad
definition of animal happiness. Eating grass, however, is
something that, after October, my steer would never do again.
Although the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the
reciprocal relationship between cows and grass is one of
nature's underappreciated wonders. For the grasses, the cow
maintains their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from
gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads grass seed, planting
it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In exchange for these
services, the grasses offer the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive
meal. For cows, sheep and other grazers have the unique ability
to convert grass -- which single-stomached creatures like us
can't digest -- into high-quality protein. They can do this
because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon fermentation tank in
which a resident population of bacteria turns grass into
metabolically useful organic acids and protein.
This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the
grasses, for the animals and for us. What's more, growing meat
on grass can make superb ecological sense: so long as the
rancher practices rotational grazing, it is a sustainable,
solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or
hilly to grow anything else.
So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn't
tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows
raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight
than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry
has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf's allotted time on
earth. ''In my grandfather's day, steers were 4 or 5 years old
at slaughter,'' explained Rich Blair, who, at 45, is the younger
of the brothers by four years. ''In the 50's, when my father was
ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.''
Fast food indeed. What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds
in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein
supplements -- and drugs, including growth hormones. These
''efficiencies,'' all of which come at a price, have transformed
raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not
everybody is convinced that this is progress. ''Hell,'' Ed Blair
told me, ''my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on
850.''
Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural,
evolutionary logic represented by a ruminant grazing on grass
bumps up against the industrial logic that, with stunning speed,
turns that animal into a box of beef. This industrial logic is
rational and even irresistible -- after all, it has succeeded in
transforming beef from a luxury item into everyday fare for
millions of people. And yet the further you follow it, the more
likely you are to wonder if that rational logic might not also
be completely insane.
In early October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was
weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic
time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated
from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves
themselves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are
prone to get sick.
On many ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture
to the sale barn, where they're sold at auction, by the pound,
to feedlots. The Blairs prefer to own their steers straight
through to slaughter and to keep them on the ranch for a couple
of months of ''backgrounding'' before sending them on the
500-mile trip to Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as prep
school for feedlot life: the animals are confined in a pen,
''bunk broken'' -- taught to eat from a trough -- and gradually
accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain. (Grazing
cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of grass
seeds.)
It was in the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on
an unseasonably warm afternoon in November. I'd told the Blairs
I wanted to follow one of their steers through the life cycle;
Ed, 49, suggested I might as well buy a steer, as a way to
really understand the daunting economics of modern ranching. Ed
and Rich told me what to look for: a broad, straight back and
thick hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong frame on which
to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a memorable face
in this Black Angus sea, one that would stand out in the feedlot
crowd. Almost as soon as I started surveying the 90 or so steers
in the pen, No. 534 moseyed up to the railing and made eye
contact. He had a wide, stout frame and was brockle- faced -- he
had three distinctive white blazes. If not for those markings,
Ed said, No. 534 might have been spared castration and sold as a
bull; he was that good-looking. But the white blazes indicate
the presence of Hereford blood, rendering him ineligible for
life as an Angus stud. Tough break.
Rich said he would calculate the total amount I owed the next
time No. 534 got weighed but that the price would be $98 a
hundredweight for an animal of this quality. He would then bill
me for all expenses (feed, shots, et cetera) and, beginning in
January, start passing on the weekly ''hotel charges'' from Poky
Feeders. In June we'd find out from the packing plant how well
my investment had panned out: I would receive a payment for No.
534 based on his carcass weight, plus a premium if he earned a
U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime. ''And if you're worried about
the cattle market,'' Rich said jokingly, referring to its
post-Sept. 11 slide, ''I can sell you an option too.'' Option
insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the
wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.
Rich handles the marketing end of the business out of an
office in Sturgis, where he also trades commodities. In fact
you'd never guess from Rich's unlined, indoorsy face and golfish
attire that he was a rancher. Ed, by contrast, spends his days
on the ranch and better looks the part, with his well-creased
visage, crinkly cowboy eyes and ever-present plug of tobacco.
His cap carries the same prairie-flat slogan I'd spotted on the
ranch's roadside sign: ''Beef: It's What's for Dinner.''
My second morning on the ranch, I helped Troy Hadrick, Ed's
son-in-law and a ranch hand, feed the steers in the
backgrounding pen. A thickly muscled post of a man, Hadrick is
25 and wears a tall black cowboy hat perpetually crowned by a
pair of mirrored Oakley sunglasses. He studied animal science at
South Dakota State and is up on the latest university thinking
on cattle nutrition, reproduction and medicine. Hadrick seems to
relish everything to do with ranching, from calving to wielding
the artificial-insemination syringe.
Hadrick and I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge
swivel-hipped tractor hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a
dump truck with a giant screw through the middle to blend
ingredients. First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a
powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed
every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of
regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed
in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why? The
stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed.
The shift to a ''hot ration'' of grain can so disturb the cow's
digestive process -- its rumen, in particular -- that it can
kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by
antibiotics.
After we'd scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned
on the mixer, Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the
pen and flipped a switch to release a dusty tan stream of feed
in a long, even line. No. 534 was one of the first animals to
belly up to the rail for breakfast. He was heftier than his pen
mates and, I decided, sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and I
gave each calf six pounds of corn mixed with seven pounds of
ground alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after
my visit, this ration would be cranked up to 14 pounds of corn
and 6 pounds of hay -- and added two and a half pounds every day
to No. 534.
While I was on the ranch, I didn't talk to No. 534, pet him
or otherwise try to form a connection. I also decided not to
give him a name, even though my son proposed a pretty good one
after seeing a snapshot. (''Night.'') My intention, after all,
is to send this animal to slaughter and then eat some of him.
No. 534 is not a pet, and I certainly don't want to end up with
an ox in my backyard because I suddenly got sentimental.
As fall turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail
messages apprising me of my steer's progress. On Nov. 13 he
weighed 650 pounds; by Christmas he was up to 798, making him
the seventh-heaviest steer in his pen, an achievement in which
I, idiotically, took a measure of pride. Between Nov. 13 and
Jan. 4, the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No. 534 put
away 706 pounds of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing
his total living expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into
this deal now for $659.
Hadrick's e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on,
cracking a window on the rancher's life and outlook. I was
especially struck by his relationship to the animals, how it
manages to be at once intimate and unsentimental. One day
Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at 3 a.m., the next he's
''having a big prairie oyster feed'' after castrating a pen of
bull calves.
Hadrick wrote empathetically about weaning (''It's like
packing up and leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you
will never see your parents again'') and with restrained
indignation about ''animal activists and city people'' who don't
understand the first thing about a rancher's relationship to his
cattle. Which, as Hadrick put it, is simply this: ''If we don't
take care of these animals, they won't take care of us.''
''Everyone hears about the bad stuff,'' Hadrick wrote, ''but
they don't ever see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was
born backward or bringing them into your house and trying to
warm them up on your kitchen floor because they were born on a
minus-20-degree night. Those are the kinds of things ranchers
will do for their livestock. They take precedence over most
everything in your life. Sorry for the sermon.''
To travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I
both did (in separate vehicles) the first week in January, feels
a lot like going from the country to the big city. Indeed, a
cattle feedlot is a kind of city, populated by as many as
100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city, however --
crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads
and choking air.
The urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent
historical development, so it makes a certain sense that cow
towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities several
centuries ago. As in 14th-century London, the metropolitan
digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs coming in,
the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding
together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with
a lack of modern sanitation. This combination has always been a
recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary animal cities
aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a
single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.
I spent the better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders,
trying to understand how its various parts fit together. In any
city, it's easy to lose track of nature -- of the connections
between various species and the land on which everything
ultimately depends. The feedlot's ecosystem, I could see,
revolves around corn. But its food chain doesn't end there,
because the corn itself grows somewhere else, where it is
implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships.
Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in
this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which
in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every
bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea
of oil.
I started my tour at the feed mill, the yard's thundering
hub, where three meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and
mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed passes through the
mill each day. Every hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls
up to disgorge another 25 tons of corn. Around the other side of
the mill, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks, into which
they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein
supplement. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid
vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these are pallets
stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin, another
antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for roughage,
all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the dump
trucks that keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.
The feed mill's great din is made by two giant steel rollers
turning against each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn
kernels into flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted,
and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg's, but with a
cornier flavor. I passed, however, on the protein supplement, a
sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea.
Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no
other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal
subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a
bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost of growing it. The rise
of the modern factory farm is a direct result of these
surpluses, which soared in the years following World War II,
when petrochemical fertilizers came into widespread use. Ever
since, the U.S.D.A.'s policy has been to help farmers dispose of
surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the
digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into protein.
Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable
foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of
animals on small plots of land. Without cheap corn, the modern
urbanization of livestock would probably never have occurred.
We have come to think of ''cornfed'' as some kind of
old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn't. Granted, a cornfed cow
develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture
American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is
demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more
saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of
Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock
not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that
the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier.
(Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6,
which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains
betacarotine and CLA, another ''good'' fat.) A growing body of
research suggests that many of the health problems associated
with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the
same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not
be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.'s
grading system continues to reward marbling -- that is,
intermuscular fat -- and thus the feeding of corn to cows.
The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a
factory farm, there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and
corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories. Of
course the identical industrial logic -- protein is protein --
led to the feeding of rendered cow parts back to cows, a
practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after scientists realized it
was spreading mad-cow disease.
Make that mostly banned. The F.D.A.'s rules against
feeding ruminant protein to ruminants make exceptions for
''blood products'' (even though they contain protein) and fat.
Indeed, my steer has probably dined on beef tallow recycled from
the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June. ''Fat is fat,''
the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised an eyebrow.
F.D.A. rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal
protein to cows. (Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as
are pig and fish protein and chicken manure.) Some public-health
advocates worry that since the bovine meat and bone meal that
cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs and fish,
infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when
they eat the protein of the animals that have been eating them.
To close this biological loophole, the F.D.A. is now considering
tightening its feed rules.
Until mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle
business, let alone the general public, comprehended the strange
semicircular food chain that industrial agriculture had devised
for cattle (and, in turn, for us). When I mentioned to Rich
Blair that I'd been surprised to learn that cows were eating
cows, he said, ''To tell the truth, it was kind of a shock to me
too.'' Yet even today, ranchers don't ask many questions about
feedlot menus. Not that the answers are so easy to come by. When
I asked Poky's feedlot manager what exactly was in the protein
supplement, he couldn't say. ''When we buy supplement, the
supplier says it's 40 percent protein, but they don't specify
beyond that.'' When I called the supplier, it wouldn't divulge
all its ''proprietary ingredients'' but promised that animal
parts weren't among them. Protein is pretty much still protein.
Compared with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively
wholesome. Yet it wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion.
During my day at Poky, I spent an hour or two driving around the
yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997
graduate of Kansas State's vet school, oversees a team of eight
cowboys who spend their days riding the yard, spotting sick cows
and bringing them in for treatment. A great many of their health
problems can be traced to their diet. ''They're made to eat
forage,'' Metzen said, ''and we're making them eat grain.''
Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a
ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing
copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching
during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch
and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer
of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen
inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal's lungs.
Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually
by forcing a hose down the animal's esophagus), the cow
suffocates.
A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our
own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral.
Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of
bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but
usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed,
pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat
dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver
disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves
the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot
polio.
Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months,
which might be about as much as their digestive systems can
tolerate. ''I don't know how long you could feed this ration
before you'd see problems,'' Metzen said; another vet said that
a sustained feedlot diet would eventually ''blow out their
livers'' and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall,
bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More
than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have
abscessed livers.
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy -- or healthy enough --
are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen,
helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver
infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in
animal feed -- a practice that, it is now generally
acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new
antibiotic-resistant ''superbugs.'' In the debate over the use
of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made
between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates
don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they
just don't want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because
factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote
growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds
this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat
sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not
for what we feed them.
I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned
from cattle feed. ''We just couldn't feed them as hard,'' he
said. ''Or we'd have a higher death loss.'' (Less than 3 percent
of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he
said, since the whole system would have to slow down.
''Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,'' he
concluded dryly, ''I wouldn't have a job.''
Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I
stopped by the shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone
implants. The calves are funneled into a chute, herded along by
a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a
restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a
slow-release pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back
of the ear. The Blairs' pen had not yet been implanted, and I
was still struggling with the decision of whether to forgo what
is virtually a universal practice in the cattle industry in the
United States. (It has been banned in the European Union.)
American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds
that no risk to human health has been proved, even though
measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These
contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the
environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling
sperm counts and premature maturation in girls. Recent studies
have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in
feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in
the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have
found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.
The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for
now, implanting hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially
irresistible: an implant costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50
pounds to the weight of a steer at slaughter, for a return of at
least $25. That could easily make the difference between profit
and loss on my investment in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I
like the idea of feeding my son hamburgers free of synthetic
hormones. But thinking like a cattleman, there was really no
decision to make.
I asked Rich Blair what he thought. ''I'd love to give up
hormones,'' he said. ''If the consumer said, We don't want
hormones, we'd stop in a second. The cattle could get along
better without them. But the market signal's not there, and as
long as my competitor's doing it, I've got to do it, too.''
Around lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534's
pen. My first impression was that my steer had landed himself a
decent piece of real estate. The pen is far enough from the feed
mill to be fairly quiet, and it has a water view -- of what I
initially thought was a reservoir, until I noticed the brown
scum. The pen itself is surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger
than a basketball court, with a concrete feed bunk out front and
a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed over the railing and
joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated a few steps,
then paused.
I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I'd worn to the
ranch in South Dakota, hoping to jog my steer's memory. Way off
in the back, I spotted him -- those three white blazes. As I
gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black
cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I stood,
staring dumbly at each other. Glint of recognition? None
whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally. No. 534 had
been bred for his marbling, after all, not his intellect.
I don't know enough about the emotional life of cows to say
with any confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or
melancholy, but I would not say he looked happy. I noticed that
his eyes looked a little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated
by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that
explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me. Unhappy or
not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had
put on a couple hundred pounds since we'd last met, and he
looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round as a barrel
through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer now
than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old.
Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. ''That's a
handsome looking beef you've got there.'' (Aw, shucks.)
Staring at No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the
butcher's chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank
steak, standing rib, brisket. One way of looking at No. 534 --
the industrial way -- was as an efficient machine for turning
feed corn into beef. Every day between now and his slaughter
date in June, No. 534 will convert 32 pounds of feed (25 of them
corn) into another three and a half pounds of flesh. Poky is
indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a
less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely possible.
Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about
the creature that stood before me. For this steer was not a
machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships
that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as
well as to the earth. And one of those other animals is us. The
unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534's
health is fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may
compromise the health of the humans who will eat him. The
antibiotics he's consuming with his corn were at that very
moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the
environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect
us and resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same
microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens
to it also happens to us.
I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I
were standing in. We don't know much about the hormones in it --
where they will end up or what they might do once they get there
-- but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly
lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet.
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common
intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that
is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in
their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a
fatal infection.
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find
their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our
stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH
environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow
is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade
environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed
that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to kill us. By
acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our
food chain's barriers to infection. Yet this process can be
reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has
discovered that switching a cow's diet from corn to hay in the
final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli
0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change,
however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle
industry.
So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in
so many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534's
pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released
a golden stream of feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for
their lunch. The $1.60 a day I'm paying for three giant meals is
a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take
into account, for example, the cost to the public health of
antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all the
environmental costs associated with industrial corn.
For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields
where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture
that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any
other crop. Keep goin
g and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all
the way down the Mississippi into
the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is
the right word) a 12,000-square-mile ''dead zone.''
But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer
needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the
Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food chain that
derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes
such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of
an industrial system powered by fossil fuel. (And in turn,
defended by the military -- another uncounted cost of ''cheap''
food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who
specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible
to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my
steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25
pounds of corn
a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have
consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have
succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what
was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we
need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though
only 14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds
and will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese.
One morning, a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in
Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and
load No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.
The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on
Route 83, a two-lane highway on which most of the traffic
consists of speeding tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or
corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling gray-and-white
complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a
notch up from shanty. These are, presumably, the homes of the
Mexican and Asian immigrants who make up a large portion of the
plant's work force. The meat business has made southwestern
Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.
A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside
the factory, a plant worker will open a gate and herd No. 534
and his pen mates into an alley that makes a couple of turns
before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute becomes
a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and
then disappears through a blue door.
That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers
were prepared to let me go. I could see whatever I wanted to
farther on -- the cold room where carcasses are graded, the
food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the carcasses are
broken down into cuts -- on the condition that I didn't take
pictures or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and
evisceration process was off limits to a journalist, even a
cattleman-journalist like myself.
What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue
door comes mostly from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other
side and, in fact, helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant
professor of animal science at Colorado State, is one of the
most influential people in the United States cattle industry.
She has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less
stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious
series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems.
Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has allowed her to see
the world from the cow's point of view. The industry has
embraced Grandin's work because animals under stress are not
only more difficult to handle but also less valuable: panicked
cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat dark
and unappetizing. ''Dark cutters,'' as they're called, sell at a
deep discount.
Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at
the National Beef plant; she has also audited the plant's
killing process for McDonald's. Stories about cattle ''waking
up'' after stunning only to be skinned alive prompted McDonald's
to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited with
substantial improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin
says that in cattle slaughter ''there is the pre-McDonald's era
and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day.''
Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534
after he passes through the blue door. ''The animal goes into
the chute single file,'' she began. ''The sides are high enough
so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he
walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his
feet on either side. While he's straddling the bar, the ramp
begins to decline at a 25-degree angle, and before he knows it,
his feet are off the ground and he's being carried along on a
conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can't look down and
see he's off the ground. That would panic him.''
Listening to Grandin's rather clinical account, I couldn't
help wondering what No. 534 would be feeling as he approached
his end. Would he have any inkling -- a scent of blood, a sound
of terror from up the line -- that this was no ordinary day?
Grandin anticipated my question: ''Does the animal know it's
going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched
them, going into the squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their
shots and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference.
If they knew they were going to die, you'd see much more
agitated behavior.
''Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed
of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The
stunner has a pneumatic-powered 'gun' that fires a steel bolt
about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He
leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When
it's done correctly, it will kill the animal on the first
shot.''
For a plant to pass a McDonald's audit, the stunner needs to
render animals ''insensible'' on the first shot 95 percent of
the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail,
the plant flunks. At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants
in the United States operate -- 390 animals are slaughtered
every hour at National, which is not unusual -- mistakes would
seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely does the
process break down.
''After the animal is shot while he's riding along, a worker
wraps a chain around his foot and hooks it to an overhead
trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he's carried by the
trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his
throat. Animal rights people say they're cutting live animals,
but that's because there's a lot of reflex kicking.'' This is
one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is the most
dangerous in America. ''What I look for is, Is the head dead? It
should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He'd
better not be trying to hold it up -- then you've got a live one
on the rail.'' Just in case, Grandin said, ''they have another
hand stunner in the bleed area.''
Much of what happens next -- the de-hiding of the animal, the
tying off of its rectum before evisceration -- is designed to
keep the animal's feces from coming into contact with its meat.
This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals enter the
kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated
every hour. (Partly for this reason, European plants operate at
much slower line speeds.) But since that manure is apt to
contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157, and since the
process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of
different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across
millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on ''food
safety'' -- which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.
Most of these efforts are reactive: it's accepted that the
animals will enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that
has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet. Rather than try to
alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste
or slow the line speed -- all changes regarded as impractical --
the industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will
inevitably find its way into the meat. This is the purpose of
irradiation (which the industry prefers to call ''cold
pasteurization''). It is also the reason that carcasses pass
through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an
antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the
National Beef plant.
It wasn't until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler,
36 hours later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the
grading room. I entered a huge arctic space resembling a
monstrous dry cleaner's, with a seemingly endless overhead track
conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses. I quickly
learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else
be tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool
to the touch, no longer animals but meat.
Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the
rails, six pairs every minute, to a station where two workers --
one wielding a small power saw, the other a long knife -- made a
single six-inch cut between the 12th and 13th ribs, opening a
window on the meat inside. The carcasses continued on to another
station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector holding a round blue stamp
glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass's creamy
white fat once, twice or -- very rarely -- three times: select,
choice, prime.
For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of
truth, for that stamp will determine exactly how much the
packing plant will pay for each animal and whether the 14 months
of effort and expense will yield a profit.
Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June
(always a worry these days), I stand to make a modest profit on
No. 534. In February, the feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye
and ran the data through a computer program. The projections are
encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight
of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him
eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based
on the June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should
he grade prime, that would add another $75.)
I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses
since then come to $61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the
feedlot (including implant), for a total investment of $917,
leaving a profit of $27. It's a razor-thin margin, and it could
easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to
make the predicted weight or grade -- say, if he gets sick and
goes off his feed. Without the corn, without the antibiotics,
without the hormone implant, my brief career as a cattleman
would end in failure.
The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to
Cattle-Fax, a market-research firm, the return on an animal
coming out of a feedlot has averaged just $3 per head over the
last 20 years.
''Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,'' Rich Blair
said when I called to commiserate. ''You try to average it out
over time, limit the losses and hopefully make a little
profit.'' He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the
business ''for emotional reasons -- you can't be in it just for
the money.''
Now you tell me.
The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of
steaks from No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the
trackless stream of commodity beef fanning out to America's
supermarkets and restaurants this June. From what I can see, the
Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing
meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And
yet there's no reason to think this steak will taste any
different from the other high-end industrial meat I've ever
eaten.
While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I've
explored some alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays
you can find hormone- and antibiotic-free beef as well as
organic beef, fed only grain grown without chemicals. This meat,
which is often quite good, is typically produced using more
grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet
it doesn't fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and
I'm not sure that an ''organic feedlot'' isn't, ecologically
speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to taste is the sort
of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate -- from animals that
have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.
Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me
a quarter of a grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most
of my freezer. I also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on
the Web; Eatwild.com is a clearinghouse of information on
grass-fed livestock, which is emerging as one of the livelier
movements in sustainable agriculture.
I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than
supermarket beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial
beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the
system runs smack into the industry's populist arguments. Put
the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it
takes too long to raise beef on grass, and there's not enough
grass to raise them on, since the Western range lands aren't big
enough to sustain America's 100 million head of cattle. And
besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot
meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be
harvested 12 months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be
harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining weight over the
winter, when the grasses go dormant.)
All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot
system is hard to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic
behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what would happen if
we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie
it once was and grazed cattle on it. No more petrochemical
fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes,
beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but would
that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not
be such a smart idea anyway -- for our health, for the
environment. And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not
cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic
resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli
poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are
costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.
So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might
expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One
grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to
be the best steak I've ever eaten. But unless the meat is
carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef
-- not surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around
in search of its food, develops more muscle and less fat. Yet
even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much
more interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed
animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it's just
my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can
taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from No.
534's pen. I can't taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet
now I know they're there.
A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing
(and, O.K., chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a
cow outside in a pasture eating the grass that has eaten the
sunlight. Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral
and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a
short, primordial food chain comprising nothing more than
ruminants and grass and light is something I'm happy to do and
defend. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course
that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.
Michael Pollan, the author of the intriguing book about
plants, The Botany of Desire, writes frequently for the
New York Times.
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