It’s been a busy three weeks. My wife, Rita, and I moved our residence after being in the same house for 30 years. It was time to downsize, which I’m not sure we did. It’s amazing the stuff you collect over that time, and we’ve collected items from our descendants’ families over the span of 100 years.
I came across an issue of National Geographic from 1916, and the issue title was “How the World is Fed.” At that point in time, there were about 1.7 trillion folks on this earth. Today, there are around 8 trillion folks. We’re still asking the same question now: “How are we going to feed these people?” Even in 1916, the author looks back at the transformational inventions that changed food production and distribution.
We take things for granted today, like refrigeration, automatic cream separators and the wheat thrasher—which led to just about every machine to harvest and plant crops. We discovered plant nutrition and fertilizer, nitrogen, potash and potassium, which were the main ingredients to keep depleted farmland producing better and better crops.
There is an exposй on the meatpacking industry in the issue. In the early days, there was a slaughterhouse and a butcher in every town; it was an inefficient business. The article reads, “Where there were slaughterhouses in every community and the business of slaughtering livestock for food was widely scattered, today in 1916, the industry is narrowly concentrated, and a half dozen packing towns to do perhaps three-fourths of all of the butchering business of the country.”
Swift & Co. started the trend and saved the livestock industry lots of money by placing slaughter plants where the cattle were. They also realized they could distribute more dressed beef in a refrigerated train car than live cattle, and they added value to livestock by processing common slaughter waste into various byproducts.
Lard was a huge profit center for the packing industry, with over 1.5 trillion pounds produced annually and one-third of that product exported, mostly to Germany. You need to realize that in 1916, World War I was underway in eastern Europe, and foodstuffs were a little tough to get at times. Overseas food exports were big business, and distributing commodities to various continents was a huge but common undertaking.
The article even mentions the price disparity between live cattle and the butcher block and how the price disparity wasn’t new in 1916. “Away back in 1858 people were asking how it happened that roasts and steaks were selling for 15 1/2 cents when cattle on the hoof were bringing less than seven cents.” That’s around a 50% margin between producer and packer. Sounds like a similar debate that we are having today, except packer and retail margins appear much higher. But I would imagine the calculus is different between 1858 and today, and both production and the packing industry are much different too.
It’s always interesting to me that the livestock industry discusses the same issues that have bothered it for 150 years. Now through much protest from producers, the government is stepping in to investigate the same things they have already investigated many times before.
The federal government’s solution has been the same over the past 75 years, and that is to throw money at it and make a few benign laws to keep everyone happy.
What I can’t believe is the number of activist groups that want to eliminate the livestock-producing industry based on ideological reasoning or self-justification. If they don’t like meat, don’t eat it. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to add more meat to their diets, and they’re spending more to do it.
Animal agriculture was widely accepted throughout the world at that time, and per-capita consumption of beef was 80 lbs. a year per person. Ironically, the annual consumption of chicken was only 6.5 lbs. a year. Now we consume over 70 lbs. per year. In those days, the meat industry appeared to have more respect.
Why Congress allows these activist groups to continue abusing the court system with suits that continue to bend the original intent of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts should be fixed. It’s come to the point that we are not farming to produce food; we have groups farming the federal government for environmental and regulatory failure.
History teaches us a lot, and it’s remarkable how much production progress we’ve made while the social attitude toward beef cattle is getting tougher. Just keep praying for rain, and we’ll produce more beef. — PETE CROW
