In Meat We Trust (18 page)

By the 1950s, chain grocers had solved those problems, in large part thanks to wartime research that resulted in new packaging materials and improved refrigeration equipment, and so they extended their command and control to meat sales as well. Their power allowed them to dictate terms to meatpackers and processors. That was especially true in the broiler industry. Chain stores nationwide used packaged chicken as “loss leaders,” calculating that shoppers lured by low poultry prices would stick around to load their carts with higher-priced goods. Selling chickens below cost quickly became a requirement for any grocer who wanted to lure customers. If a competitor across town sold broilers for, say, 29 cents, lamented one grocer, “we’ve got to sell
at 29 or lose our customers for everything else we sell in the store.” The more dependent the chains became on cheap chicken, the more they pressured Jewell and other processors to supply broilers at a low price. Jewell had no choice but to comply, and he in turn pressured his growers to increase production. The resulting output glutted the market, and grocers snapped up cheap poultry for use as loss leaders. “This starts the price-cutting
sale cycle all over again and everybody gets hurt!” complained a merchandiser for a major chain.

The pain wouldn’t end anytime soon, as the chickens themselves got a dose of modernity that gave shoppers even more meat for the price. In 1945, the Dekalb Company of Illinois began developing hybrid birds that would mature and feather quickly, produce two hundred or more eggs a year, and provide meaty flesh. They weren’t alone. In 1946, a tour guide at a USDA research facility boasted about the changes scientists there had wrought in the basic bird. “See that batch
of pullets over there?” he asked a visitor. “They’re practically all white meat, tender and delicious.” But few did more than A&P to encourage and sustain the broiler boom. The grocer sponsored “Chicken of Tomorrow” contests that rewarded breeding innovations. Thousands of breeders and growers participated, and in 1950, the USDA calculated that nearly 70 percent of the 625 million chickens raised for meat descended from Chicken of Tomorrow bloodlines. By the early 1950s, the American broiler was meaty and big-breasted, boasted hefty drumsticks, and arrived at maturity faster and on less feed than chickens sent to market just a few years earlier. Modern chickens converted feed into meat more efficiently than did cattle, and nearly as efficiently as that master of conversion, the hog; and pound for pound, chicken offered a less costly form of protein than its two competitors.

During the fifties, in part because of the chains’ demands but also because so many investors wanted a cut of the action, the broiler industry resembled nothing so much as a gold rush, complete with boomtowns, fast wealth, and spectacular collapses. Even so, output soared, and production costs, and the prices consumers paid, dropped. Genetics, breeding for meat, and antibiotic-laced feeds helped, of course, but so did the integrated production-processing structure developed by Jesse Jewell. Indeed, the broiler industry was dominated by the same people who had invented it: integrators like Jewell who exercised control from egg to chick to packing plant to grocery store. “Integration has made chicken
the cheapest meat on the market,” Jewell said, “and we want chickens to stay cheap.” His centralized decision making also allowed him to manage the price gyrations ignited by grocery chains’ use of broilers as loss leaders. He balanced the up-down prices of basic broilers with more stable income from “value-added” products like chicken sticks (a takeoff on another popular innovation of the 1950s, the fish stick) and chicken-based frozen TV dinners, the latter an innovation introduced during the decade by the Swanson company, another major broiler maker. Frozen, canned, and refrigerated foods satisfied consumers’ demand for convenience and taught shoppers to think of chicken as something other than a basic commodity sold at below-profit prices. Jewell could manufacture those value-added products because he controlled the number and types of chickens that flowed into his processing plants. Analysts applauded Jewell and other integrators, arguing that they were more business-oriented and “cost-conscious”
than traditional farmers who operated on “a smaller scale.”

Here, then, was modern farming of the sort so many people had envisioned back in the 1920s. It was subsidized, thanks to government research and poultry improvement programs. Production was automated and large-scale. Critics complained that poultry growers were mere hired hands rather than farmers. But, for better or for worse, that was precisely the goal: to make the farm function like a factory. Supporters pointed out that contract farming was neither new nor unusual. For decades, commercial vegetable and fruit farmers had raised crops under contract for food processors who required produce of uniform size and grade. Moreover, every farmer who participated in a federal subsidy program worked, in effect, as a contract producer, and as many supporters of integration pointed out, most Americans worked for a contracted price. “As a whole,”
commented one analyst, “agriculture stands alone as the only major industry that still clings to its glorious past and holds out for a ‘free price.’” In time, another predicted, integration would “revolutionize the production
of animal products,” and contract farming would be the norm rather than the exception.

The story of the mid-twentieth-century agricultural revolution is less one of malevolent corporate capitalism than it is the struggle to balance the welfare of the producing minority with the demands of the consuming majority. The middlemen in this case were federal policies aimed at protecting the few in order to benefit the many, as well as the tools and ideas aimed at reducing the costs of feeding a nation. For decades, the farmer epitomized the rugged American individualist, living on the land, beholden to no one. But in the 1950s, farmers shouldered heavier burdens, charged as they were with feeding the world, preventing the spread of communism, and paving the way for consumers to spend money on televisions, vacations, and college educations. An urban majority screamed bloody murder if the price of steak rose 5 cents a pound, blamed lazy farmers and ignorant politicians for that woe, and threatened to vote said politicos out of office. So midcentury farmers employed the ideas and tools that empowered them to make low-cost food and earn a decent living doing it. They fed their livestock antibiotics and caged their chickens. They accepted the federal government’s goal of eliminating “marginal” farmers and subsidizing large, efficient ones. In the 1950s, those who wanted to stay on the land had to play by the new rules; that was the price of survival.

Jewell’s chicken-based empire was just one manifestation of that midcentury revolution. Farmers who started their careers in the 1920s went from horse-drawn plows to agile, powerful tractors. From dousing crops with Paris Green to watching an airplane drench fields with DDT. From shoveling feed and manure to pushing a button and letting a machine do the work. A half-century later, “pro-food” activists would argue that Americans have paid a high price for that revolution, and at the time, many farmers reacted with trepidation. But far more responded the way Americans would, fifty years later, to the digital age: with amazement, awe, and delight.

Among those who experienced the revolution was John Davis (born in 1904), who grew up on Corn Belt farms, first in Missouri and then in Iowa. During his childhood, his family relied on horse-drawn plows and cultivators and a steam-powered thresher (which they shared with their neighbors), and they butchered and processed their own hogs. He graduated from high school in 1923, a moment when the farm crisis hammered even relatively prosperous farm families like his. By then, the Davises were living in central Iowa, not far from Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), one of the nation’s premier land grant schools. The proximity allowed Davis to attend school and help on the farm, but after earning a bachelor’s degree in economics, he, like so many other young rural Americans, migrated away from the farm. During the 1930s, he watched the nightmare of the Great Depression from a small Iowa town where he taught school, but in summers he headed to the University of Minnesota for coursework that earned him a master’s degree in agricultural economics. He finished in 1935 and never returned to full-time farming, choosing instead to take a series of white-collar jobs, including two stints at the USDA. In 1954, he accepted a position at Harvard, where he directed an agriculture program at the university’s business school.

By that time, the fifty-year-old Davis had spent his entire life immersed in agriculture, albeit from a variety of perspectives. Those vantage points inspired a simple, but powerful, observation: farmers and their work could not be isolated from the rest of the economy. Viewing “agriculture as an industry
in and of itself” may have made sense a century earlier when most Americans lived and worked on the land, he wrote, but in the mid-twentieth century, that perspective was both foolish and shortsighted. Davis observed that modern farmers had handed over the tasks of “storing, processing, and distributing food and fiber” to “off-the-farm business entities,” like trucking companies and grocery chains. A different set of “off-the-farm” companies designed, built, and manufactured the inputs on which modern farmers relied, whether tractors and combines or antibiotics and poultry cages. Together, these three sectors—agricultural production, processing-distributing, and input manufacturing—constituted an interlocked whole, no part of which could survive without the others. Similarly, the triad’s manufacture and distribution of food and fiber constituted one of the overall economy’s largest components. Davis and a collaborator calculated that in 1954, consumers spent $93 billion on agriculturally based “end products and services”—food, paper, restaurant tabs, textiles, and so forth—a figure that didn’t include dollars spent to grow, process, manufacture, or distribute food and fiber. Americans could not afford to conceptualize agriculture as an enterprise distinct from the rest of the economy.

Davis also understood that agriculture constituted the weakest link in the triumvirate because its individual units—farmers—lacked the power and the information needed to make market decisions. Input manufacturers and output processors, in contrast, executed financial and production decisions based on internal factors largely under their own control. Even if commodity prices fell, the price a farmer paid for, say, a tractor typically remained high because that price was based on factors controlled by the manufacturer, not the farmer. Davis argued that over time, the market stabilized this “cost-price” squeeze, but always at the expense of farmers and the taxpayers who subsidized that weak link. The more subsidy programs that Congress created to protect farmers, the more those programs entangled other members of the triad. Manufacturers of grain silos, to use a simple example, had a vested interest in ensuring that farmers produced surpluses that needed to be stored in those silos.

But like other economists and politicians at the time, Davis distinguished between farmers who practiced “commercial” agriculture and those “low-income” farmers who did not. He argued that marginal farmers—men and women who worked the land but either refused to or could not commit to thinking like factory managers—contributed nothing substantive by way of food and fiber; as a result, society lost “the value of their productive potential.” Worse, when policymakers and politicians pondered solutions to the “farm problem,” they invariably characterized that quandary in terms of those two poles—commercial farmers on one end and low-income farmers on the other—rather than seeing the two as connected to each other and to the other two members of the triumvirate. Until and unless Americans grasped the complexities of providing food and fiber for a non-agricultural population as well as the intimate connection between agriculture and the economy as a whole, and until they made hard choices about what constituted a “viable” farm, the agricultural problem would never be solved. Davis urged Americans to think of the production of food and fiber not as agriculture but to perceive it instead as “agribusiness.” If that included abandoning adulation of the “family farm” and rethinking the myth of the sturdy yeoman, so be it. Only then would the nation come to terms with the fundamental conundrum of how to feed an urban majority and sustain a consumer economy.

Americans should have paid more attention. Over the next fifty years, agriculture in general and the production of livestock and meat in particular would become even more complex. Global politics, new dietary ideals, inflation, and environmental concerns would inspire farmers and meatpackers to devise ever less expensive ways to raise animals and transform them into meat. And in the late twentieth century, the logic of factory farming played out to a perhaps inevitable conclusion as large corporations demolished the boundaries between and among the triumvirate that fed the nation.

5

“How Can We Go Wrong?”

I
N
1966,
A REPORTER WHO
visited Monfort Feed Lots, Inc., near Greeley, Colorado, marveled at the combination of sights he found. A “touch of the Old West”
was delivered by Monfort veterinarians who ambled through the lots on horseback to monitor the well-being of the sixty thousand head of cattle fed there, but otherwise the ambiance was more suited to astronauts than cowboys. One building contained an electronic device that looked like a “control board at the Cape Kennedy missile site.” Employees fed it punch cards that contained vital information: minutely calculated feed formulas for the company’s livestock, whose daily diets required a thousand tons of alfalfa, corn, meat scraps, vitamins, minerals, antibiotics, and hormones. To the tune of “clicks and clatters,” the machine read the cards and transmitted their data to a second machine housed at a nearby silo, a three-hundred-foot-tall structure subdivided into vertical bins, each bin containing one ingredient. The electronic signals tripped the bins’ gates, releasing feedstuffs into a truck equipped with rotating drums that mixed the goods en route to the feed bunks. When the driver neared his destination, he slowed to fifteen miles an hour and flipped a switch that opened the drum. The contents spilled onto a conveyor belt and from there into a feed trough, ready for the cattle that milled around on the Monforts’ three hundred acres. When the cattle were thirsty, they served themselves, using their noses to trip an automatic fountain fed by underground pipes.