Colorado has lost roughly 1.5 million acres: Cited in “A Report on the Conversion of Agricultural Land in Colorado,” Colorado Department of Agriculture and the Governor’s Task Force on Agricultural Lands, 1997.
eight of the nation’s top ten TV shows: Cited in White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, p. 613.
145 The median age of Colorado’s ranchers and farmers: Cited in Sam Bingham, “Cattlemen Organize Land Trust: Ranchers’ Group Works to Keep Colorado Properties Agricultural,” Denver Post, June 22, 1997.
thus far protected about 40,000 acres: Interview with Lynne Sherrod, executive director, Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust.
vanishing at the rate of about 90,000 acres a year: Cited in “Loss of Agricultural Land Figures for Colorado,” Memorandum by David Carlson, resource analyst, Colorado Department of Agriculture, January 8, 1998.
146 The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers: The statistic comes from Florence Williams, “Farmed Out,” New Republic, August 16, 1999.
147 “To fail several generations of relatives”: Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), p. 95.
7. Cogs in the Great Machine
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1981) unfortunately remains the essential starting point for an understanding of America’s meatpacking industry today. Nearly a century after the book’s publication, many of the descriptive passages still ring true. Sinclair’s prescription for reform, however — his call for a centralized, socialized, highly industrialized agriculture — shows how even the best of intentions can lead to disaster. For a contemporary view of nineteenth-century meatpacking, I relied mainly on Yeager, Competition and Regulation and Skaggs, Prime Cut. For the struggle to improve working conditions in Chicago’s Packingtown, see Unionizing the Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth Century Meatpacking Industry, edited by Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997). One of the essays in the book, “The Swift Difference,” by Paul Street, gives a strong sense of the corporate paternalism and decent working conditions that were later eliminated by the “IBP revolution.” For an account of that revolution’s leadership, see Jonathan Kwitny, Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); James Cook and Jane Carmichael, “The Mob’s Legitimate Connections,” Forbes, November 24, 1980; and James Cook, “Those Simple, Barefoot Boys from Iowa Beef,” Forbes, June 22, 1981. Also see the inadvertently revealing corporate history by Jane E. Limprecht, ConAgra Who? $15 Billion and Growing (Omaha: ConAgra, 1989). Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Penguin, 1993) is a provocative diatribe against “the industrialization of beef.” Kathleen Meister’s response to Rifkin, “The Beef Controversy,” American Council on Science and Health Special Reports, August 31, 1993, is less convincing, but makes a number of good points. Osha Gray Davidson’s Broken Heartland does a fine job of explaining the root causes and social implications of the rising poverty in America’s meatpacking towns. Carol Andreas’s Meatpackers and Beef Barons: Company Town in a Global Economy (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994) examines the recent transformation of Greeley. I am grateful to Ms. Andreas for discussing her work at length with me.
In Greeley, many former and current Monfort employees — some at the managerial level — shared their perspective on changes at the company after its sale to ConAgra; at their request, I have not included their names. I am grateful to Javier and Ruben Ramirez for the many hours they spent with me discussing the labor histories of Greeley and Chicago. For a straightforward analysis of structural changes in the cattle business, see James M. MacDonald and Michael Ollinger, “U.S. Meat Slaughter Consolidating Rapidly,” USDA Food Review, May 1, 1997. The best book on today’s meatpacking industry is Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), edited by Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith. The essays by Lourdes Gouveia, Donald D. Stull, Mark Grey, and Steve Bjerklie were especially useful to me. I am indebted to Ms. Gouveia, a professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, whose work on the recent changes in Lexington, Nebraska, is exemplary and who helped me contact people there. Her essay “Global Strategies and Local Linkages: The Case of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry” is well worth reading, as is the rest of the book in which it appears: From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food, edited by Alessandro Bonanno, Lawrence Busch, William H. Friedland, Lourdes Gouveia, and Enzo Mingione (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994). For a government report that belatedly confirms many of the findings made by Stull, Grey, Davidson, Gouveia, and others, see “Community Development: Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties With Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces,” Report to Congressional Requesters, United States General Accounting Office, February 1998. Milo Muungard, the executive director of Nebraska’s Appleseed Center, gave me useful material on the social and environmental effects of a migrant industrial workforce. Greg Lauby, an attorney whose family has lived in Lexington, Nebraska, for generations, graciously shared his knowledge of the town’s history, its residents, its recent changes — and the reasons for its smell. I am particularly grateful to the many IBP workers who invited me into their homes and told me their stories.
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150 earns more money every year from livestock products: 1997 Census of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce), p. 36.
150 the largest private employer in Weld County: Indeed, a recent study by two Colorado State University economists found that ConAgra’s facilities are “practically synonymous with Greeley and Weld County.” Andrew Seidl and Stephan Weiler, “The Estimated Value of ConAgra Packing Plants in Weld County, CO,” Agricultural and Resource Policy Report, Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, Fort Collins, February 2000, p. 3.
A typical steer will consume: Interview with Mike Callicrate, Kansas feedlot operator.
deposits about fifty pounds of manure: The figure was determined by researchers at Colorado State University. Cited in Mark Obmascik, “As Greeley Ponders Tax, Cows Keep On Doing Their Thing,” Denver Post, July 29, 1995.
produce more excrement than the cities: According to O. W. Charles, of the Extension Poultry Science Department of the University of Georgia, one head of cattle generates the same amount of waste as 16.4 people. Cited in Eric R. Haapapuro, Neal D. Barnard, and Michele Simon, “Animal Waste Used as Livestock Feed: Dangers to Human Health,” Preventive Medicine, September/October 1997. Using that ratio, the roughly 200,000 cattle in Monfort’s two Weld County feedlots produce an amount of waste equivalent to that of about 3.2 million people. The combined populations of Denver (about 500,000), Boston (about 550,000), Atlanta (about 400,000), and St. Louis (about 375,00) produce much less execrement than Greeley’s cattle.