My new book, Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado, is now out in print and e-book format. Click here to learn more
Few questions are more important to any society than how it feeds itself. My recently released book, Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado, answers that question by examining the dynamic network of relationships between people, institutions, land, and water in the Piedmont region of Northern Colorado from 1870-1970. By focusing on the development of a region that is critical for explaining how agricultural systems in the United States evolved, Cattle Beet Capital makes visible the historically contingent processes that undergird modern food.
Three years before Horace Greeley mounted a failed bid for the presidency in 1872, he had another dream: an irrigated, utopian agricultural colony in the American West. In 1869, Greeley lent money, advice, and advertising space in his New York newspaper to several hundred would-be farmers who hoped to fulfill his vision by planting a colony in Northern Colorado. Motivated by Jeffersonian visions of small farms and yeoman independence, they succeeded, naming their colony after its wealthiest benefactor: Greeley. By 1970, the city of Greeley had become the epicenter of the largest complex of commercial cattle feedlots in the United States, slaughtering, packing, and shipping over 300,000 cattle to market each year. Automation, chemical fertilizers, artificial growth hormones, mono-cropped corn, and the odor of fecal waste supplanted Horace Greeley’s bucolic vision, replacing it with a heavily industrialized agriculture. Cattle Beet Capital is the story of the processes that made industrial agriculture in Northern Colorado from 1870-1970.
Cattle Beet Capital examines an important yet understudied region that historical geographer William Wyckoff calls the Northern Colorado Piedmont. The region incorporates all of the lands dependent on the South Platte River and its tributaries for irrigation. By 1900, the Piedmont was characterized by small, well-established farms that cultivated a variety of market crops and were served by several rail lines connecting the region to the nation. Its agricultural productivity was made possible by intensive irrigation. Early Piedmont settlers codified the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation that would be replicated throughout the West. Further, despite the paltry and unpredictable flows of the South Platte, Piedmont farmers possessed more acres under irrigation than any other comparable region in the West. Due to its rapid growth and market orientation, the Piedmont was among the regions most was well-suited to industrial agriculture by 1900. As such it offers a template for understanding the processes through which Western agriculture developed. Yet no book-length study exists that provides more than a fragmentary analysis of Piedmont agricultural development.
Historians of capitalism and industrial agriculture have questioned the degree to which nature has been simply a vehicle for capital accumulation and whether capitalism was historically compatible with ecological health. Cattle Beet Capital answers that question largely through an analysis of the region’s beet sugar industry, an industry which did not exist in 1900. Yet, by 1914, the Piedmont refined more sugar than any region in the nation and all of its factories were owned by one company – Great Western Sugar. Though that statistic suggests corporate dominance of land, resources, and people, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, I argue that corporate monopoly was a byproduct of the company’s dependence on existing economic and ecological relationships. The most significant capital outlay for the beet sugar industry was in its refineries. Owing to the bulkiness of beets and the need to process them rapidly after harvest before their sugar content decreased, Great Western Sugar had to place those factories within the immediate vicinity of growers. The sugar company was not just investing in an industry, but in a place. Growers, who typically owned their land, chose to grow beets for Great Western Sugar since they were the most lucrative crop available. They also fed their livestock with sugar beet byproducts and fertilized their lands with the manure that resulted. In short, the corporation and its growers depended on one another – for beets, for feeds, and to maintain soil health. While all farming creates biological disruptions, capitalism and sustainable agriculture were relatively compatible on the Piedmont at least until 1930 primarily because the corporation and its growers depended on local resources, meticulous soil maintenance, and on each other for their success.
The foregoing example begins to illustrate how Cattle Beet Capital re-orients Western agricultural narratives away from California. By the early twentieth century, California was already dominated by large, heavily capitalized farms and orchards and much of the Central Valley was given over to a mono-crop cultivation that employed manufactured fertilizers and chemical pest controls. By contrast, the Piedmont – like most of the West - was dominated by small to mid-sized farmers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Colder climates, the need to rotate cover crops with cash crops, and the limited ability to harness mechanical and chemical technology to local conditions precluded rapid industrialization. In that sense, I argue that capital and the free market were inadequate to transform land, animals, and crops into discrete units for public consumption.
This suggests that understanding agricultural development in the American West requires a more extended periodization than is offered by most available histories. It is common to end studies of western agriculture during the 1920s and 1930s, or to focus primarily on the period following World War II. This yields a fragmented picture since many of the technological and scientific innovations that transformed agricultural practice and the relationship between farmers and the land occurred during the interwar period and were then put into practice following World War II. Thus, it is easy to view the earlier period as characterized by limits on environmental impacts, while the latter era becomes a narrative of environmental degradation. While I do not entirely question those conclusions, by examining changes on the ground in a chronological sweep that encompasses both periods, Cattle Beet Capital provides a more satisfactory picture of environmental and agricultural transformations.
This lengthened periodization supports thorough insights into the relationships between state-sponsored – or ‘agri-state’ - scientists, agro-industry, and farmers. Agri-state employees encompassed the only publicly funded conglomeration of scientists and officials whose mission was to serve the needs of farmers specifically and American agriculture more generally. I argue that they largely failed in their mission. The trajectory of agri-state research on the Piedmont from 1900-1960 showed a decided inclination to favor the prerogatives of industry. As scientists from agro-industry promised greater efficiency and expanded yields through science and technology, agri-state officials failed to question potential harms. Rather, they claimed that the products of industry, when used as directed, were unqualified goods. This philosophy led agri-state researchers and scientists to conduct the majority of field trials necessary for industry to bring its products to market. In the process, agri-state researchers became junior partners with agro-industry and the site of agronomic research expertise moved from public science on the Piedmont to private industry in distant labs. Further, by placing so much faith in efficiency and expanded yields through technology, state-sponsored scientists supported a knowledge economy whereby performing experiments aimed at uncovering the long-term impacts of applying chemicals to the land or questioning the value of industrial products in agriculture had become largely taboo.
Despite this critique of state-sponsored science, Cattle Beet Capital argues that local farmers were not the pawns of industry or the state, but rather employed agri-state research in ways that reflected their material self-interest. This was especially true in the field of irrigation where small, mutually-owned irrigation companies took advantage of technologies developed at land grant colleges to make their operations more efficient when it suited them and ignored technology that had the potential to uncover ways in which water users appropriated more water than their rights allowed. Further, I show how Piedmont farmers were able to attract the expertise and resources of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s for the building of a massive trans-mountain diversion project without sacrificing any of their regional water autonomy and at a price tag that forced the federal government to pay the lion’s share of the costs.
While Cattle Beet Capital offers fresh insight into areas such as irrigation, agri-state science, and the role of capitalism in agricultural development, the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Each chapter draws out the network of relationships – economic, cultural, and environmental – that made the Piedmont a thoroughly industrialized place. The book’s major contribution is not found so much in the Greeley feedlots of 1970, but in the processes and contingencies that shaped their evolution.