by Maureen Ogle
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: molasse
s 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.”
In the years just after the war, Americans explored confinement’s possibilities, building on studies like those conducted at ISC but also borrowing ideas from European farmers, many of whom had long coped with lack of land and labor by confining their livestock. By the late 1950s, many American farmers, especially hog growers, had moved beyond the initial confinement concept of paved surface plus fencing and carried the idea to its logical conclusion: moving swine not just off pasture but completely indoors, using heating, cooling, and ventilation technologies to replicate ideal outdoor conditions. Confinement protected animals from predators and weather and enabled livestock producers to automate feeding and to exercise complete control over animals’ diets, something that was impossible when livestock ran on pasture.
Those who took the plunge regarded the money as well spent. Two Indiana brothers who moved their cattle from pasture to confinement reduced per-head feeding time from four hours to just fourteen minutes a day, and cleanup from three hours to twenty-four minutes. That in turn enabled them to increase the number of cattle they fed from 82 to 257. A South Dakota man raved about his neighbor’s confinement operation. “He’s got what I call a beef factory for the 60s!” said the man. “Slickest set-up I ever saw.” He just “pushes a few buttons and feeds 300 head in 20 to 30 minutes.” Thanks to that equipment, the penned animals ate a “complete ration” of “silage, corn, protein pellets, [and] molasses,” all of it so thoroughly mixed that “every mouthful a steer [ate was] alike,” a crucial benefit given that meatpackers and grocery chains demanded animals with specific carcass attributes. The owner confirmed that he was pleased by the switch from pasture to confinement. “You should have been here last winter to appreciate fully what it means,” he told a reporter. Multiple storms dumped a “17-inch snow pack on the ground.” While his neighbors’ cattle lost weight trying to navigate the treacherous terrain, his enjoyed “good gains.” Indeed, confinement mitigated the role of climate and enabled Corn Belt farmers to compete with year-round feeders like the Monforts. “We were getting killed selling twice a year,” said an Iowan who moved his cattle into confinement. “Now we’re marketing every month, averaging the ups and downs, and making money.” A Michigan farmer was blunt about what drove him to invest in confinement: “I can’t afford to pasture cattle on high-priced Corn Belt land.” From the 1950s on, and even in the relatively rural Midwest, urban sprawl and burgeoning networks of highways and interstates gobbled agricultural acres and pushed land prices into the stratosphere. Many farmers sold their holdings to developers, but those who did not were forced to farm intensively rather than extensively. Pasture grazing had always imposed an upper limit on the number of animals the grasses could feed, but with confinement, farmers could increase herd size on a small parcel of land, allowing them to turn what had been pasture to other uses, such as planting grain crops.
Hog farmers were even more enthusiastic about confinement. Consider an Illinois man who marketed about seven hundred head a year, feeding them with corn he grew. In the late 1950s, he sat down and reconsidered. “I analyzed my work schedule,” he said, “and found that raising corn brought me in only 10 per cent of my income, but took 50 per cent of my time. That was the turning-point of my farming career.” He rented his corn acres to another farmer, increased his hog herd, and invested in automated augers that carried feed from bins to mixing floor to hog pens. By 1960, he’d upped his output to seventeen hundred head and was aiming for two thousand. “With 700 hogs, my gross ran about $30,000,” he mused, and he’d “had to work as long and as hard as any farmer.” By “modernizing,” he doubled his gross and “with far less work.” Confinement benefited hog farmers in two other ways. First, it helped them reduce the otherwise high mortality rates that cut into profits. An Iowa farmer learned that. Year after year, his pasture-based swine suffered dysentery. In the early 1950s, he adopted antibiotic-laced feeds in hopes of reducing disease-related mortality, but the drugs made no difference because, an agent from Iowa State College explained, the soil in his pasture teemed with parasites and bacteria. Moving the hogs indoors significantly reduced his losses from disease. Second, confinement protected hog farmers’ investments in expensive breeding stock. As grocers and meatpackers became increasingly specific in their demands, many midcentury farmers replaced older stock with breeds engineered to produce leaner hogs, and some invested in “Specific Pathogen-Free” stock: animals bred and born in sterile environments. Having invested their money, farmers were loath to let the animals run free. Confinement also enhanced the possibilities of specialization. A Wisconsin hog farmer decided that instead of raising hogs from birth to market, he would focus on inseminating and farrowing sows, selling the offspring—“feeder pigs”—to farmers who only wanted to feed for market. Because he conducted his new operation entirely indoors, he could breed his sows more often and sell feeder pigs year-round. Demand was so high that he contracted with other farmers to produce feeders for him. Another Corn Belt family—a father, two sons, and a son-in-law—also shifted to confinement as a way to streamline their hog farm. One family member specialized in breeding, another in farrowing; a third finished the hogs for market; and the fourth stayed in the farm’s office, keeping the books and arranging sales. Mimicking the division of labor found in a factory or corporation, they argued, enhanced their profits and protected them in the market.
Land grant faculty and USDA officials urged midwestern feeders to specialize and invest in confinement to reduce costs and hone their competitive edge. Packers and feed dealers who wanted Corn Belt producers to stay in the game supported the new technologies, too. A Kansas City feed manufacturer contracted with packers on one side, and hog farmers on the other, preselling the farmers’ hogs to the packers. The manufacturer provided “technical assistance” to farmers who agreed to use its feed and raise hogs according to contracts that stipulated every detail, from feed formula to breeding stock to the design of breeding pens and farrowing huts. Another midwestern feed company rented
boars, sows, and gilts (young females that have not yet reproduced) to Corn Belt farmers. The farmers bought feed from the manufacturer and paid swine “rent” only after they’d marketed their animals, often for a premium and on contract, to packing companies that regarded those hogs as higher quality than those from conventional farms.
Assistance like that eased the pain of the transition from conventional to factory farming, but more was involved than simply a fatter bank account. An Illinois man who moved his hogs into confinement reported that he’d reduced his labor by half even as he doubled his output. “You don’t have to go to confinement feeding and slats to stay in the hog business, but it surely takes a lot of the drudgery out of raising hogs!” he said. His two sons applauded the move: both were in college; both planned to come back to the farm; neither wanted the “drudgery” of old-fashioned farming. One man reported that new-style confined hog farming required “more power, more interest, and more insurance. The tax assessor was there before the roof was even on.” But he had no desire to go back to the past: he was making more money, but as important, his operation was easier to manage and more comfortable for him and the animals. “It boils down to our being able to take better care of more total cattle with less labor,” said another Iowan. “At the same time, the cattle are doing better. How can we go wrong?”
Make no mistake: farmers who wanted to ease their workloads weren’t lazy; they were realistic. No one believed that the labor shortage would end, and even hands who could be persuaded to get on board weren’t interested in the sunup-to-sundown, seven-day weeks of the past. Many people believed that confinement would lure a younger generation of farmers. Confinement did not cure all ills, and no one expected it to do so. But for many, it was a welcome departure from the past.