Engineering Beef: A Brief History of the Modern Steak

Recently, I had the privilege of speaking in the Bingham Gallery at Utah Valley University as part of the Roots of Knowledge Speaker Series. You can access the talk, titled “Engineering Beef: A Brief History of the Modern Steak” here. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback.

Here’s a brief abstract:

Prior to World War II, most beef produced in the United States was raised by small farmers who employed the crops on their lands to fatten cattle and the manure from their livestock to replenish their soils. During the 1930s, a small cohort of Colorado farmers were determined to change that by abandoning crop farming and fattening cattle year-round. Their story provides the starting point for understanding why more than 90% of domestic beef today is fattened in massive commercial feedlots and disassembled in nearby slaughterhouses. As part of that story we’ll learn about how corn became such a critical feed, why pharmaceutical drugs are fed to most commercial livestock, and about the role agricultural colleges such as Utah State play in making meat. I’ll also introduce you to a five-foot tall Japanese-American researcher and centenarian who transformed cattle feeding. If you want to know the history behind the modern steak, join me!

Check out my new book!

My new book, Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado, is now available in print and e-book editions. You can read more about it in the Research and Publications section of my webpage, or click here to link to the publisher’s site where you can gather additional information and purchase the book.

The Beirut Explosion and Ammonium Nitrate in Historical Perspective

Last week a massive explosion in Beirut at a storage facility housing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate killed at least 137 people, displaced 300,000 residents, and spread debris and damage for a two-mile radius.[1]  While some government officials, reporters, and international observers suspected terrorism, Beirut authorities concluded that negligence and mismanagement of the facility were the principal causes. While accurate, this conclusion misses a great deal of historic context.

The Beirut explosion is the latest in a long line of ammonium nitrate blasts. For people residing in the United States, the most well-known incident involving ammonium nitrate occurred in 1995 when domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used the substance as the catalyst to kill 168 people inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But, this was by no means the largest ammonium nitrate explosion in U.S. History. Few Americans will recall an accidental explosion of the substance in Texas in 1947 that killed nearly 600 people. Smaller explosions have also occurred in Kansas City and Waco. Internationally, ammonium nitrate explosions in Germany, France, North Korea, Belgium, China, and Mexico have killed scores of people.

Though ammonium nitrate explosions grab headlines, they generally obscure why the compound occupies its place in the world today. Approximately 80% of all manufactured nitrogen in existence today is used in agriculture and is made by synthesizing ammonia (NH3). Ammonia – and derivatives such as ammonium nitrate - are cheap and supply nitrogen in a form plants can use. This is critical since nitrogen is the most essential element in plant growth (Phosphorous and Potassium are next in line). It constitutes 78% of Earth’s atmosphere and is present in every living cell. However, it has to be ‘fixed’ into a form that can be used by plants. Most livestock manures, once decomposed, supply usable nitrogen. Plants from the legume family such as alfalfa, peas, clovers, and beans possess Rhizobium bacteria that transform inert nitrogen into plant food. This is why, until the middle of the twentieth century, the majority of the world’s crop farmers also cared for livestock and rotated their crops. They needed a ready supply of nitrogen (and other nutrients).

German chemist Fritz Haber changed all of this in 1909 when he synthesized ammonia through what would eventually become known as the Haber-Bosch Process. Given the timing of the achievement and the fact that ammonia is highly volatile, the Haber Bosch process was used to greatest effect making explosives during World War I. Armed with the new process following the war, large chemical companies employed surpluses of ammonia to manufacture fertilizer. Since the process of synthesizing ammonia involved fossil fuels such as natural gas, petroleum companies joined the fray. Consequently, companies such as Shell and Monsanto were among early manufacturers.

After World War II, the quantity of ammonia exploded in developed nations such as the U.S. where farmers, seeking to dominate the world grain and soybean markets, applied ammonium nitrate and anhydrous (liquid) ammonia liberally to crops in the Midwest and Great Plains. With cheap and abundant fertilizer available in quantity, farmers no longer needed to devote lands to raising livestock, planting legumes, and rotating fields. In the developing world, ammonium nitrate enabled countries such as India to harvest unprecedented quantities of rice, corn, cotton in what has been called the Green Revolution. By the 1990s, nitrogen synthesized by the Haber-Bosch process accounted for 75% of the world’s total available nitrogen.

To say that manufactured ammonium nitrate is ubiquitous is an understatement. It feeds the American lawn addiction, as almost all of the nitrogen content in today’s lawn “weed and feed” products comes from ammonium nitrate. Corn provides a more precise metric for synthetic nitrogen usage. In 2019, farmers in the United States planted 91.7 million acres of corn, applying an average of 250 pounds of synthetic nitrogen per acre. This translates to a total usage of nearly 11.5 million tons on this one crop. At this rate, the quantity of ammonium nitrate that exploded last week in Beirut could have supplied one season’s nitrogen needs for 22,000 acres of corn.

All of that synthetic nitrogen is not innocuous, as the tragedy in Beirut shows us. Studies have shown that inorganic nitrogen sources such as ammonium nitrate are more likely to leach into the soil than nitrogen that is organically derived. These nitrates create hostile environments for organisms in the soil. When those nitrates run off, they pollute surface and groundwater and lead to various forms of pollution in lakes and streams. Since much of this drains into the Mississippi River, nitrates are principally responsible for a massive “dead zone” in Gulf of Mexico, where the river enters the ocean. Excess nitrates have also been linked to stomach cancer and infant disease such as Blue Baby Syndrome. Moreover, since synthesizing fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate requires heavy burning of fossil fuels, present and future conversations about climate change must address their contributing role.

As the smoke clears from the ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut, our questions about this tragedy need to extend beyond why such huge quantities of this compound were being stored in hazardous conditions. The fact that our food systems are so entangled with a substance that is equally potent as a fertilizer and an explosive should give us pause. While it is unlikely that we will entirely wean ourselves from synthetic fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate, a more just relationship with fellow humans and fellow organisms requires that we re-consider our dependence on it.

 [1] Figure as of August 8, 2020.

For Further Reading

Leigh, G.J. The World’s Greatest Fix: A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Olmstead, Alan L. and Rhode, Paul W. Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Russell, Edmund. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemical from World War I to Silent Spring. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Smil, Vaclav. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

Making Meat and the Coronavirus in Historical Perspective

Recently, outbreaks of COVID-19 at pork, beef, and poultry processing plants throughout the nation have cast a spotlight on the nation’s meat supply chain. Some of the world’s largest processors, including Tyson, Smithfield, Hormel, JBS, Conagra, and Cargill have all shuttered locations in response to Coronavirus outbreaks among their employees. In their analyses of the crisis, news outlets have emphasized the portion of the supply chain that flows from slaughter to consumer.

            While angst over COVID-19 at processing plants and the ensuing breakdown of supply chains certainly justifies the media coverage, it misses opportunities to unpack the front end of the supply chain where some animals are currently being euthanized rather than being sent to idled slaughterhouses. This is no small problem. Recently, National Public Radio reported that millions of pigs will likely be euthanized as they approach and exceed 300 pounds in weight. Why? Can’t animal feeders simply slaughter their animals at larger weights? Certainly, Americans can stand for a little more fat on their pork chops?

            Understanding the processing problem requires some examination of the historical contingencies that brought us here. During the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of hogs and cattle were raised on mixed farms where fattening livestock for slaughter was accomplished principally by feeding crops grown on the farm. It involved rotating fields and pastures to maintain crop diversity and soil fertility. Operators calibrated cultivation to synchronize with feed requirements and vice-versa.

            Raising and processing livestock for the consumer market changed drastically in the post-World War II era. Cheap, overproduced, and subsidized crops such as corn and soybeans could be shipped to feeders whose operations focused entirely on rapidly fattening animals. As livestock were packed into tighter spaces, land costs could be minimized. Moreover, animals that moved too much were burning calories that ate into profits.

            Rapid weight gain quickly became a function of more than just feeds. After World War II, one of the uses that chemical giants such as DOW and DuPont found for their new synthetic compounds, such as DDT, was to kill organisms that targeted livestock, thus eliminating environmental factors that slowed down growth. Pharmaceutical companies also played significant roles as they experimented with antibiotics such as penicillin and aureomycin. These became essential ingredients in animal feeds since they not only fought diseases endemic to animal confinement into claustrophobic spaces, but also functioned to increase rates of growth. Emerging companies such as Merck and Eli Lilly discovered that synthetic growth hormones could speed up the fattening process. Experiments with the hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) - at Iowa State and in the pens of cattle feeders such as W.D. Farr in Colorado - concluded that it could speed growth by as much as 30%. Within one year of F.D.A. approval in 1955, over 80% of all feedlot cattle were implanted with or fed DES. Within two decades, both DES and DDT were banned due to their toxicity, but not before industry concocted a host of other drugs and hormones to take their place.

            Feeds, drugs and hormones were part of a larger story of engineering modern livestock to meet consumer demands for cheap meat protein. During the 1950s and 1960s, commercial producers, also called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), employed machines and computers to mix and deliver precise concentrations of feeds and additives calibrated to convert animal feeds to human food. Trucks rapidly displaced trains to move livestock to slaughter. As meat processing grew and became more heavily capitalized, smaller producers were pushed out and companies such as Tyson, Purdue, Cargill, and Smithfield placed their operations closer to the CAFOs.

            The same technical precision used in CAFOs was employed by the processing plants. As heavily capitalized companies such as Tyson, Conagra, Smithfield, and Cargill came to dominate the processing market, they demanded that CAFOs engineer animals to be slaughtered within vary narrow weight categories and ages in order to meet real or perceived consumer demands for specific cuts and qualities of meat. Plant machinery and employees were also engineered to synchronize industrial slaughtering tasks with CAFO operations. Between 1945 and 1995, the time needed to move chicken from birth to slaughter decreased by half, while their market weight at slaughter increased by over 50%. Rapid changes also forced the average steer or heifer to spend approximately four months in a feedlot to gain the 300-400 pounds necessary to reach slaughter weight. Animals that continued to gain weight possessed little or no market value. This is exactly what is currently occurring as processing plants shut down and livestock reach slaughter weight.

            There is an additional medical problem in all of this. Livestock are slaughtered young in part to avoid disease.  They are fed a diet that, in type and quantity, defies their evolution. Their living conditions run contrary to nature. As a result, their lives in CAFOs are not only a sprint to slaughter, but a race against the disease clock. Cattle held longer in feedlots are more likely to develop liver abscesses and respiratory diseases. Chickens that grow too large suffer from musculoskeletal disorders. Commercially produced meat has a bio-engineered clock that will not suffer deviation.

            So, why are feeders euthanizing animals? Our meat production system has been designed since World War II along very narrow industrial lines that do not tolerate variation. So, while we place a human face on how the COVID-19 pandemic is playing out in processing plants throughout the nation (and we should do this), we should also step back and evaluate the processes that made the crisis.

Feedlots and Freeways

Roads tell stories. One of the roads that stands out most vividly in my memory as a child was Interstate 5. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I-5 was the principle highway between home and Southern California. I remember it primarily for its monotony.  Endless farms and fields whizzed by, punctuated by the occasional irrigation canal. Then, at what seemed to be the exact midway point in the trip, came the odor. What smelled at first like a distant barn, soon assaulted the nostrils. Along the east side of the highway stood Harris Ranch –several roadside miles of cattle packed into commercial feedlots, their concentrated excrement dominating the olfactory senses. Though we all held our collective noses, Harris Ranch made me curious. How did each of these animals come to be confined in one place? Situated in the midst of almonds, fruit trees, and vegetables, cattle did not belong. The same highway speeds that generate good questions also preclude us from finding thoughtful answers. So it was with cattle and Interstate 5.

Typical Feedlot along I-76. Note the road in the foreground used to deliver feeds. The cattle congregate at the feed bunks behind the road. Note also the massive pile of manure at the center of one of the feed pens in the background. Finally, in the far background, observe a feed mill where feeds are delivered and mixed with the aid of a computer that calibrates the rations to achieve maximum weight gain per pound of food eaten (also called feed/conversion ratio)

            A recent research trip on I-76 provided clarity to the feedlot queries of my youth. The highway traverses a diagonal arc that connects I-70 in Denver with I-80 in western Nebraska, rarely straying more than a few miles from the South Platte River. Since I was on my way to interview cattle feeders in Sterling, my nose was already primed for the smells I would encounter. I was not disappointed. Speeding along at seventy-five miles per hour, I inhaled the familiar odor of concentrated excrement emitted by several feedlots. Because I have spent some time around feedlots, their geography is somewhat familiar to me – the rectilinear pens, the feed-bunks and adjacent roads that allow for mechanical food distribution, the piles of manure accumulated at the center of the pens and, of course, the cattle.

            On this trip, however, other roadside attractions drew my attention. In between the widely dispersed feedlots, on the north side of the highway, stood fields of Round-Up Ready Corn, stretching off for what seemed to be a few miles. Stalks were tightly and uniformly spaced, each one about four feet high. The fields were punctuated by occasional farmhouses and grain silos off in the distance. On the south side of the highway, the scene was entirely different.  Instead of manicured fields, High Plains flora predominated – buffalo grass, blue grama, sagebrush, and a host of invasive plants. Occasionally, several cattle came into view, grazing on the abundant forage that a particularly wet year made available to them. Barbed wire stretched along the highway as if to remind gawkers such as myself that, no matter how close I came physically to these bovines, networks of animal ownership and private property placed multi-layered boundaries between those driving through the landscape and those who occupied it.

            It did not take long to realize that the feedlots, the corn, and the grazing cattle were all connected. The privately-owned grazing lands on the south side of I-76 were populated with young steers and heifers, generally less than one year old. No crops grew here because the owners do not possess the water rights necessary to grow marketable crops in a climate that averages less than fourteen inches of rain annually. So, these operations take advantage of the cheaper land costs and free protein energy offered by the grasslands to raise young cattle. They are called cow/calf operations if the cattle are birthed on the ranch, or backgrounding if the animals are purchased after birth. The next stop on the short life journey of these animals is a nearby feedlot-likely one of the many I viewed from my windshield. Typically, the young cattle are sold when they weigh between 750-800 pounds, at around one year of age. In the feedlots, cattle are fattened on a diet that prioritizes corn grains (ground corn kernels) and silage (the other parts of the corn plant processed into edible bits). Four to six months later, feeders sell their cattle to a slaughterhouse, each animal having gained, on average, 400-500 pounds. And, where did that corn come from?  You guessed it. It was grown in the fields on the north side of the highway. These lands, made far more valuable by water rights from the South Platte River, were put to use growing corn grain and corn silage year in and year out – most of it contracted to the feedlots.

            A conversation with former Colorado Agricultural Commissioner and state legislator Don Ament confirmed my observations. He stated, “on the south side of the interstate, guys are grazing cattle out there and it’s all going to end up in that feedlot, and the corn is all going to end up in that feedlot....  The corn is where you can get the water, but the feedlot is where this is all going, and the calves from this place are all going.” Going further, Ament made an argument for the critical importance of commercial feedlots and the landscapes that feed them, “…Two-thirds of our agricultural output in Colorado is livestock, primarily cattle. It’s not growing beans. Everything…the corn, the alfalfa, the hay goes through those cows.” In summary, a significant majority of the agricultural energy of an entire state is funneled through a single animal.

            What I witnessed at highway speeds was neither boring nor innocuous. Rather, it was a landscape-sized snapshot of how beef-eaters are fed. The interconnected world of calves, grass, fences, water, corn, feedlots, and fattened cattle were all visible from my windshield. I was also observing very particular uses of biologic and chemical energy. The stored energies of Plains grasslands make the proteins that grow the calves in their first year of life. Water from the South Platte River irrigates the fields that are then cultivated through a host of synthetic pesticides, genetically modified corn, and fossil-fuel powered machinery. Cattle are fattened with those stored energies, while byproducts such as carbon dioxide, methane gas, and manure – containing it own energy byproducts - are released. Animal scientists have concluded that, under modern cattle feeding conditions, the energies of 7 to 8 pounds of feed are required to generate one pound of beef. And, each of these energies are found on the interstate – hidden in plain sight.

            These energies have a history. In some of my future blog posts, I will break down how we arrived at this point by explaining the processes by which corn, cattle, water, science, feedlots, farmers, consumers, and more evolved together. The food systems, the landscapes, and the agro-ecologies that produce them – human and non-human – are not inevitable, but historically contingent.  Few questions matter more than how a society feeds itself. I intend to put together the historical pieces. Stay tuned….

DISCLAIMER: All highway observations for this blog post were made with hands firmly planted at the 10 and 2 position on the steering wheel. While Michael encourages readers to observe the world with historic curiosity, he does not endorse doing so in an unsafe manner.