In Meat We Trust (21 page)

Midwestern hog farmers experienced even more turmoil in part because pork’s future looked none too bright. In a 1956 Roper poll, many interviewees described pork as “less nourishing”
than beef or poultry and more fattening than both. Those polled associated beef with “athletes, bankers, [and] slim and beautiful women” and pork with “poor people, truck drivers, [and] large families.” Between that, grain subsidies, and the labor shortage, many hog farmers wanted out. A Minnesota man who abandoned hogs in favor of corn in 1958 told a reporter that as grain subsidy programs reduced the risks of crop farming, hogs became “more of a gamble.”
And, he added, “When I raised hogs, I didn’t have time for anything else.” “Hog-raising is not only hard work but it’s also a year-round chore,” one made increasingly difficult by the lack of labor. “Now I’m free in the winter. Last year, we made a two-week trip to Florida and Washington.”

But Corn Belt hog farmers also faced new competition, in their case from entrepreneurs in the southern and southeastern United States. As federal allotment programs reduced cotton and tobacco acres in the South, landowners there hunted for alternatives and many turned to hog farming. Despite the region’s historically pork-centric diet, southerners had little experience raising hogs because landowners had traditionally devoted their land to cash crops and imported pork from northern states. So when southerners turned to hogs in the 1950s and 1960s, they started from scratch and, not surprisingly, built enterprises modeled after the broiler industry. Hurdles abounded. Southerners competed against experienced Corn Belt hog farmers, and they had to ship corn in from the Midwest. On the plus side, however, were weather—hogs gain weight faster in warm climates—and in states like North Carolina, proximity to the East Coast’s metropolitan markets. As in the broiler industry, the new hog producers tended to be entrepreneurs rather than traditional farmers, and as in broiler making, they relied on contract growers and assistance from affiliated industries. Swift, for example, had taken advantage of North Carolina’s relatively cheap land and labor and built a packing plant there but had trouble buying enough hogs to keep it running at capacity. To encourage local farmers, the plant’s managers leased sows to farmers who agreed to take at least fifty of them and to sell the offspring to Swift. “Inherent in all this
are the principles of the industrial production line,” explained a reporter in 1959. “The businessman at one end of the line ships out standardized pigs to farmers who’ll feed them according to a set pattern.” Regular production schedules would stabilize supplies and prices, and consumers would get “cheaper, better pork.” “This is the beginning
of a revolution in swine raising,” raved a Missouri slaughterhouse owner who tried to transplant the model to his state.

Many midwestern farmers cringed at such praise, fearing that contract farming would reduce them to the status of hired hands. But an executive with a Missouri agricultural consulting firm advised doubters to keep an open mind. “If you don’t want
[outsiders] to take over your traditional product,” he said, “don’t spare the horses.” Translation: Modernize your operations.

At least hog farmers had antibiotics to help keep costs in line. Cattle feeders had seen the results those high-tech inputs provided, and that’s why they applauded a 1954 announcement from Iowa State College: Wise Burroughs, an ISC faculty member, had discovered that feeding cattle the synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol, known as DES, accelerated growth and thus lowered feed costs. At last cattle feeders had their own version of a pharmaceutical miracle worker.

As noted earlier, the war-era search for new feedstuffs had led to the use of antibiotic-laced feeds on broiler and hog farms. But antibiotics had limited value for cattle feeders: unlike chickens and hogs, bovines have multiple stomachs and they don’t chew their food so much as they moisten it to ease its trip to the first stomach, the rumen. Those multiple stomachs also complicated scientists’ understanding of bovine nutrition. Researchers had figured out that cattle manure contained some substance—an X factor—that satisfied the nutritional needs of hogs and chickens. They also knew that the rumen harbors immense colonies of microorganisms that transform roughage into carbohydrates. Beyond, that, however, and even in the 1940s, bovine digestion and nutrition were little understood, and precisely what transpired in the rumen and the other stomachs was a mystery.

In the 1940s, bovine nutrition research centered around institutions in Indiana and Ohio, including the Ohio State Agricultural Experiment Station where Wise Burroughs was employed. Burroughs’s team included a nine-month-old Hereford named Christopher Columbus. A visitor to the laboratory in 1948 described Chris as an exceptionally “happy”
and healthy animal—despite his two-legged colleagues’ habit of rummaging through his rumen via a hole cut in his flank. (After a local newspaper touted Chris’s unusual contribution to science, a representative from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals descended on the lab. He concluded that Chris was in neither danger nor pain and not likely to become a “charcoal-broiled steak” anytime soon.) Burroughs and his colleagues fed Chris combinations of feedstuffs and then pulled those back out of the rumen for analysis, hunting for nutrition-rich combinations that maximized rumen activity. They studied urea (nitrogen-rich but converted to protein by the rumen) and molasses (which sweetened the mix and added carbohydrates), but corncobs, a source of cellulose-rich roughage, provided a particularly tantalizing line of research. Cobs piled up by the billions on American farms; if those could be used as cattle feed, livestock producers would save money.

Burroughs’s work with corncobs
intrigued Roswell Garst, an Iowa hybrid corn producer (and, in 1959, host to visiting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev). In the late 1940s, Garst conducted corncob experiments with his own herd and discovered that cattle fed a mixture of cobs and cornmeal fared as well as those that ate shelled corn, and that using the cobs cut his feeding costs by half. Eager to know more, and worried that Iowa cattle feeders like himself were losing market share to western feedlots, Garst prodded officials at Iowa State College in Ames to devote more resources to the study of bovine nutrition and to hire Burroughs.

By 1951, Burroughs was ensconced in his new laboratory at ISC and had obtained a research grant from Rath Packing Company, located in eastern Iowa. He built an artificial rumen and, using sheep rather than cattle, continued to study the mechanisms and nutritional demands of bovine digestion. (Burroughs switched to sheep, also ruminants, because they cost less, ate less, and were easier to manage than cattle.) Some of his subjects received conventional feed and some ate feed supplemented with antibiotics. But Burroughs dosed one group with DES.

There was nothing unusual about his decision to use the hormone in his research. As we saw earlier, midcentury scientists were determined to unravel the mysteries of growth, whether in plants, animals, or humans, and many of them studied the impact of hormones on growth, aging, and death. In the early 1940s, for instance, a scientist at the University of Chicago created hormone-based substances to destroy Japanese rice crops, and by the time the war ended, Americans were using hormone-based herbicides on their lawns and farms. DES had attracted the attention of researchers studying hormonal changes in women. As women age, their hormone levels gyrate and decline, a process that produces hot flashes, headaches, and the other miseries of menopause. For years, physicians had relied on hysterectomy to alleviate those woes, but some scientists believed that replacing those hormones would be a more effective (and presumably less intrusive) tactic. Natural hormones were expensive, so researchers sought synthetic substitutes. Among them was DES, an exceptionally powerful estrogenic substance that could be manufactured from coal tar derivatives. Like natural estrogens, DES is potentially carcinogenic but there the similarities end, not least because DES is about three times more powerful than natural estrogens. In addition, while the body breaks down and eliminates ordinary estrogen, DES residues linger for some time, and even when they’re excreted, they retain their estrogenic power. Despite these drawbacks, physicians used DES to counteract the effects of menopause and prescribed it to pregnant women; manufacturers added it to breast-enhancement creams.

During World War II, animal nutritionists latched on to DES for the same reason they focused on antibiotics: as a way to accelerate livestock growth and thus reduce the costs of production. In the early 1940s, a poultry scientist at the University of California–Davis discovered that DES altered the life cycle of male birds: when he implanted hormone pellets in roosters, their combs shrank, they sprouted “female feathers
and a layer of fat,” and they “lolled around like capons.” Most important, at least from a marketing point of view, their ordinarily “stringy” flesh “became light and tender.” In 1947, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved DES for use as a chemical castrator in the form of pellets implanted in the birds’ heads or necks. (Those parts of the anatomy were removed at packing plants and in theory, there was no danger that the pellets would end up in human stomachs.) By the time Burroughs began tinkering with DES, a team of scientists at Purdue University had already tried feeding it to both cattle and sheep.

Burroughs assumed that the sheep he dosed with DES would grow faster than those in his control groups. To his surprise, however, all the animals grew at the same rate, regardless of what they’d eaten. The only feed common to all the subjects was clover hay. Burroughs prowled the pages of scientific journals and discovered that, indeed, common livestock forages such as clover and soybeans contain estrogenic substances. He theorized that estrogen somehow improved the rumen’s digestive mechanism and maximized its nutritive output. If so, adding hormones to feed would provide cattle the same growth boost that antibiotics gave chickens and hogs. DES was inexpensive to manufacture and DES implants cheaper than clover grown on expensive pasture. In February 1954, Burroughs announced that cattle growers, like their hog and poultry counterparts, could reap the benefits of a growth-promoting additive.

Not that DES was a precise counterpart of antibiotics, if only because it posed more risks. In the early fifties, mink growers who fed chicken heads to their animals complained that DES residue rendered females barren. In New Jersey, a man who worked with DES at his job with a pharmaceutical company sued his employer because of side effects. Despite his wearing a respirator and rubber gloves, the DES had “poisoned”
him, he complained; he’d “suffered effemination” and “been rendered permanently impotent” and therefore deprived of “the rights and benefits of marital relations.” He wasn’t the only one. The owner of another chemical company told FDA officials that male employees who worked with DES experienced breast development and impotence. (The FDA urged him to hire older workers, men who might not be as concerned about DES’s “devirilizing effect.”
) Even meatpackers weren’t convinced of the wisdom of adding DES to cattle diets. One complained that hormone-fed cattle failed to “cut out a carcass
that’s as good as they look on the hoof.” He worried, too, that “short-cut, cheaper fattening methods promoted by every agricultural college around” were doing more harm than good. “The beef we’re seeing today doesn’t measure up to the old corn-fed beef. It looks plump and good on the outside, but when you cut it open the quality isn’t there. The way things are going, corn-fed beef will be a thing of the past in four or five years.”

But many Corn Belt feeders dismissed those concerns. “My family
and the tenants’ families have been eating the meat for months,” said an Illinois cattleman. “It’s completely safe.” An agricultural reporter pointed out that farmers didn’t have to handle much of the stuff: one ounce was sufficient to “fortify”
rations for 2,800 head of cattle, and that small dose translated into “an extra half ton of beef.” DES had “become the bright hope
of feed dealers and cattle feeders alike.” Still, he and others advised farmers to use common sense and caution so that they didn’t end up looking like “sweater girls.”
By early 1955, 2 million cattle were ingesting Stilbosol, a premix manufactured and marketed by Eli Lilly and Company, which had secured five-year exclusive rights to the patent. “Amazing?
You bet it is!” enthused a writer for
Farm Journal
. “Nothing has ever hit the meat-animal business with the impact of stilbestrol,” he opined, not even the much-ballyhooed antibiotics. Nor was DES the only new cattle feed. Burroughs and other researchers engineered a host of products designed to reduce Corn Belt feeders’ costs: molasses and corncobs, for example, became standard components of the feed toolbox, as did plastic pellets, which generated friction and boosted rumen efficiency.

DES and antibiotics helped Corn Belt feeders hone their competitive edge. But they still faced one obstacle that weighted the game in favor of western and southern feeders: weather. That explains the enthusiasm for another tool that Corn Belt feeders adopted just after World War II: confinement.

The roots of confinement date back to the wartime emergency of the 1940s. In California, the combination of labor shortages and the pressure of urban growth on farmland forced cattlemen not just to feed rather than graze their livestock but to keep the animals confined to a relatively small, fenced area. Many of those feeders kept their animals on paved lots in order to reduce the labor needed to move manure out of the way. Those first steps toward confinement intrigued agricultural specialists searching for ways to help farmers elsewhere reduce production costs and cope with lack of labor. Farmers and agronomists alike were also influenced by the example of the broiler industry, which had relied on confinement to manage large flocks, and analysts began crunching the numbers to determine if taking animals off pasture could pay. A study conducted in the 1940s at Iowa State College revealed that in wet spring weather, cattle struggling to maneuver in inches-deep mud burned so many calories that they lost as much as three pounds a month, loss that negated weight gains and turned expensive feed into a “complete loss”
in the account book. Add in mud-related injury and disease, and analysts calculated that mud cost midwestern farmers money, time, and labor. When the ISC team moved its livestock onto a paved lot, the animals lost less weight and had fewer injuries; profit margins increased by as much as $10 a head. The pavement also allowed the team to move manure using tractors and blades rather than shovels and shoulders, and to spread it where it was needed rather than where livestock deposited it. “You can’t
afford
a muddy barnyard,” a reporter told readers of a farm magazine. “If yours is, it’s costing plenty.”