Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Two years after he sold Revelation, Donnell’s dream seemed to have come true: the bull’s babies were measuring staggering scores. Donnell knew that the weekend rancher from Houston didn’t quite know what he had, so he called him to explain.

  “A superstar,” Donnell told the rancher, teaching him, as he often has to do, that a bull in today’s marketplace is like a football player in the NFL draft, complete with a long roster of stats. He told him that Revelation’s progeny were showing beef marbling scores that were off the charts, breathtaking rib-eye areas, and carcass fat depths over their twelfth ribs that were things of glory. It would be a near miracle to produce a bull capable of passing on even one of these super stats—but three of them?

  “You should syndicate Revelation,” Donnell advised, offering to bring the bull back to the R.A. Brown Ranch, where it would enjoy higher visibility, the conditioning of an athlete, and Donnell’s help in selling shares so that, in return for investing, many could profit from the sale of Revelation’s semen and progeny. Word spread fast. Donnell and the rancher sold seven shares of Revelation for $1,650 apiece and had a list of fourteen more ready to pony up. In no time, Revelation was sure to become the most valuable Red Angus bull in history.

  And so, of course, Donnell was feeling something resembling pride when he went outside on a routine cattle call one warm October morning in 2007 and looked around the east holding pasture. Not pride exactly, because obviously Revelation was God’s creation, not really Donnell’s. But still. He felt blessed. That was it: he felt very, very blessed to be the man God had chosen to bring a bull like Revelation into the world.

  “Come on, bulls!” Donnell cried. He sprinkled sweet grain on the brittle prairie grass, and the bulls gathered, as bulls do, like children after the big piñata spill. All of them but one. “Come on, bull! Come on, buddy!” Donnell called to the slacker lying some twenty yards away. It was Revelation. “Hey!” He went closer, and closer still, and that’s when he saw Revelation lying there motionless, like some dumb lump of clay. “Come on, buddy!” Revelation lifted his head in acknowledgment. But he could not get up. Donnell bent over to find that his right back leg had been mangled, most likely in a fight with another bull, a battle for turf or just a boyish tussle for fun. Revelation was lame, and a lame bull was worthless. A lame bull would be sent without further adieu to the packinghouse.

  “No,” Donnell said. “Please God, no.”

  —

  THE AVERAGE AMERICAN at the backyard grill who cares to think about the steak sizzling before him may imagine little beyond the packinghouse, where meat is cut and shrink-wrapped, or perhaps the feedlot, where beef cattle fatten up on corn on their way to market. But those are only two steps—relatively short and highly industrialized ones—in a long process. Before they ever get to the feedlot, cattle live the lives their bodies were built for: grazing alongside their mothers on endless pastures at ranches called “cow-calf operations.” These are the places vacationers pass on highways beside flat Ohio landscapes and the gentle hills of Iowa and the Nebraska prairie and the vast plains of North and South Dakota, Utah, New Mexico, Montana. Cows! All those cows! Beef is the largest single segment of American agriculture, a $72 billion industry. It isn’t like pork, isn’t like poultry. Commerical pigs and chickens live their whole lives in massive, industrial-sized barns. Beef, at least in its beginning stages, will never be produced that way because the simple fact remains: All cows eat grass. You need land to grow calves, lots and lots of land. You need people devoted to a lifestyle. Beef production is unlike any other agricultural industry in that it has remained utterly dependent on the family farm—over one million of them in the U.S. Most of these are small operations with fewer than fifty head, and are manned by the same people who sing in the church choirs and run the school boards and football leagues that knit the fabric of small towns like Throckmorton. Many are weekend ranchers with day jobs who are attached to the land and need grazing animals to keep the pastures mowed. Only a few make serious money at it: cattle operations bring in an average gross income of $62,000, the lowest income of any type of farm.

  The R.A. Brown Ranch belongs to a subset of these ranches that specialize in breeding. These are the “seed-stock providers.” Whether a steak is delicious—richly marbled, not too fat or too lean—has less to do with the cattle than with the people who breed them. Choice steaks are ultimately determined by their designers, like the cowboys at the R.A. Brown Ranch. These are the people who stand at the beginning of the beef production chain. They are the inventors, the tinkerers who choose the genetics that determine the qualities of America’s tenderloin, rib eye, sirloin, filet mignon, and burgers.

  April marks the earliest days in a commercial cow’s life, and arguably the happiest. The calves at the R.A. Brown Ranch, just six to eight weeks old, have been tagged and now wander freely over the scruffy desert hills where the sunrise is so red it fills the sky with stripes of crimson and turns all the cowboy hats pink. Jeff, a young guy with prematurely salt-and-pepper hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and an easy laugh, has the back of the cattle drive, while Casey and Cameron take the flanks. Without warning and for about the fourth time this morning, Jeff breaks into song: “We three kings of Orient are, / Bearing gifts we traverse afar, / Field and fountain, moor and mountain, / Following yonder star. / Oh, oh . . . !”

  “Dude!” Casey calls back to him. “Stop! Just . . . stop.” Slim, trim, and serious, Casey’s supposed to be in charge of this drive, moving about two hundred calves and their cows steadily over the hilly terrain back to the ranch, about eight miles away, for some routine doctoring.

  Jeff cannot get the song out of his head. There’s a goofy quality to him, an unselfconscious enthusiasm for cowboying that belies the whole rough-and-tumble spirit of the thing.

  “You are so in love,” offers Cameron, the cowboy with the movie-star looks: jet-black hair, square athletic shoulders, and eye-catching dimples.

  “I did not say I love her,” says Jeff. Jeff wants a wife, a fact he is reticent about with no one. He lives with his dog, Boss, in the bunkhouse on the ranch, the only unmarried cowboy here. The three cowboys are dressed alike: white hats with the brims bent identically up, buttery leather chaps, stiff coiled ropes clapping from their saddles, muddy spurs. The net effect is startlingly quaint. Cowboys? This is not some dude ranch where parents take the kids for some reenactment of the past. This is an intact cowboy culture that in fact exists all over America, if you know where to look. Here is a slice of Americana virtually unchanged in the last century, practically Amish in its tenacious grip on the power and glory of tradition. There are some places in the country where four-wheelers and pickups and even helicopters have replaced the loyal quarter horse as the vehicle of choice for cattle drives, but not here. Not in Texas. This is less a matter of a romance—although there is plenty of that—and more of necessity. Rugged, rocky terrain blanketed with mesquite and prickly pear is largely impenetrable to bulky trucks and anything with tires. Hooves, out here, simply work best. Likewise the cowboy costumes: Ride through thorny mesquite without chaps and long sleeves just once and you get the point. The sleeves also protect against sunburn and the hat shades the face and acts as an umbrella in the rain.

  Out here on the range there often are no other context cues—just cows, horses, ropes, songs, giant sky and prickly pear, buffalo grass, big bluestem, Texas wintergrass—and so it’s easy for a cowboy to lose sight entirely of what century he is, in fact, in.

  Moving a herd of cows is not a difficult task, especially Red Angus, notoriously gentle and polite. (For a good time, try wrestling up some Brahmans.) Jeff, Casey, and Cameron keep the cattle in a clump, occasionally waving their arms, letting out a “Wheeet, wheeeet” or “Get on now, gals!”

  Jeff: “I never said nothing about love.”

  Casey: “Okay, then shut up about it.”

  Cameron: “You’ve known her for
a whole six days.”

  Jeff: “Eight. She’s awesome.”

  The cowboys whistle through their teeth, slap their chaps, and the cattle move as one, a rumbling blanket of rolling amber, humming their lazy cow songs: “Aaaaroooom, aaaroooom, aaaroooom.”

  Beef, even in this century, is still personal, is cultural, is cowboys. Cattle intended for market (the males) stay at cow-calf operations like this one for about six months grazing alongside their mothers, and are then loaded on a trailer and taken to auction. From the auction barn they head to cattle hell: the feedlot, where they join as many as 100,000 others in tight quarters gorging on a corn and antibiotic mash intended to make them obese. It has become a fact of the modern industrial steak: if people want to be able to afford it, this is the way it’s going to be. It takes too long to fully grow cattle on grass, and America doesn’t have enough grass for all that cattle anyway. Cheap corn means affordable beef.

  The mature calf lives at the feedlot for another six months, gaining as much as three and a half pounds of flesh per day. What walks in as 800 pounds will be sold as 1, 200 at just over a year old. The margins are stunningly slim: feedlots make about $3 per head. The feedlots sell to the packinghouses, where the invisible, holy transfiguration takes place: animal becomes meat. It is an act of determined ignorance and shrink-wrapping, untouched by sentimentality, as old as mankind and updated to maximize profit. The packinghouse is where beef finally goes corporate. The big four, Tyson, Cargill, JBS Swift, and National, slaughter nearly all of America’s beef.

  America eats 27 billion pounds of beef a year. That’s about 62 pounds per person, or about 3 ounces each day. We show no signs of slowing down. Demand has increased 20 percent in the last decade alone. This is, in part, a function of population growth and in part a function of food science and the efforts of the seed-stock providers: our steaks keep getting tastier.

  Beef is low- and high-tech simultaneously. Past necessarily coexisting with future. Because of the cowboys and because of the science.

  —

  ON THE DAY HE FOUND REVELATION lame in the east holding pasture, Donnell stood there feeling sick. Gut-sick like a man watching his house burn down, or a groom at the altar waiting for a vanished bride. In the silver liquid-nitrogen tank up in the ranch’s artificial insemination center, he had about one hundred “straws,” or doses, of Revelation’s semen—hardly a gold mine. The most prized Red Angus bull in the world—his very own creation—was now lying at his feet, worthless.

  Even the bravest, most proficient semen-collecting cowboy can’t get good semen from a lame bull: the stress of injury affects both quantity and quality. (Collecting semen from a bull is a straightforward task: Put a bull in a pen with a teaser cow or a teaser horse—a bull will mount just about anything—and wait a few minutes. A cowboy stands near the bull with an artificial vagina, a kind of warm water balloon, and when the bull begins to ejaculate, the cowboy reaches in and redirects the bull’s penis into the artificial vagina. On average, a good bull will make two hundred doses for breeding from just one ejaculation, so it’s worth it.)

  Donnell took his cell phone off his belt clip, called his wife, Kelli, back at headquarters, the small red house, with the goat pen outside, where Donnell grew up and now lives with Kelli and their two teenage boys, Tucker and Lanham.

  “Oh, Donnell,” Kelli said, taking in the horrible news. A bull-breeding aficionado, Kelli proudly serves as president of the Red Angus Association of America, and at the ranch she’s marketing maven and sturdy voice of wisdom. She told Betsy, Donnell’s sister, who works in the office, too, and soon the cloud of grieving engulfed brothers, spouses, kids.

  In the end, Donnell decided, no, he would not give up on Revelation. No. He would try to save that bull. So he hauled Revelation away in a trailer and drove five hours to a veterinary hospital near Austin, and it was there that he learned Revelation had two torn ligaments, the anterior cruciate and the medial collateral in his right rear knee. “Nothing we can do for him here,” the vet said, pointing Donnell to specialists at the Kansas State University, eleven hours away, and so Donnell got in the truck and drove farther east. Like Barbaro, the famous racehorse, if ever there was an animal worth going the extra mile, and mile, and mile, it was Revelation.

  “We can try to construct a new knee,” the Kansas vet said, with only vague encouragement in his voice. “Sure, we can try.”

  —

  DONNELL’S PARENTS, Rob and Peggy, used to live in the red ranch house, but in 1998 they retired to the fancy home in town with the big columns out front, just as Rob’s own parents had done before them. For her part, Peggy laments leaving the ranch: she misses the cowboys and their songs and their shenanigans. Before she married Rob, Peggy’s name was Peggy Donnell, and that’s how Donnell got his name.

  Rob, now seventy-four, is famous in the beef world; he played a vital role in creating the steak now sitting on America’s plates. Rob came of age when the Hereford was the cattle of choice for the U.S. beef industry—a reliable, thrifty breed with far more muscle than the Texas Longhorn that had preceded it as America’s main beef.

  At Texas Tech, young Rob learned of a brave new world. “Continental breeds!” he said to his father, R.A., when he came home with his degree in agriculture in 1958. Breed a Hereford with, say, a Brown Swiss and get a larger carcass with, perhaps, the same quality meat—or better! Rob had other ideas, other breeds, many other dreams. A man of tradition, R.A. would have none of it. Not until he was virtually on his deathbed, in 1965, did he give young Rob the reluctant blessing to crossbreed. Within days of that blessing he died of a heart attack, creating the legend of the ranch: If R.A. hadn’t given his assent, the family never would have enjoyed its explosive success in creating better and better meat.

  Young Rob got to work. He crossed a Hereford with a Brown Swiss and, sure enough, he got cattle fully one hundred pounds heavier at weaning rate, with the same heartiness as Hereford. Brilliant! he thought. But the market did not quite agree. The problem was the cattle looked ugly, not uniform in color like the good old-fashioned amber Herefords. Some came out brindle, some gray, and some had . . . spots. Coat color has nothing whatsoever to do with carcass quality, but even so, Rob’s cattle were discounted at auction because they looked like freaks.

  So Rob got back to work. He bred and he bred and in 1975 mixed a Simmental with his Herefords. That solved the color problem. A year later he added Simbrah to that hybrid, to create cattle with heat tolerance. He added Red Angus for marbling. He got a planeload of Senepol from the Virgin Islands to add a gentle demeanor. Surely the market would embrace the concept of tenderness and quality grade in a heat-tolerant animal with a good disposition.

  In 1989 he trademarked his unique hybrid the “Hotlander,” a breed still popular among connoisseurs.

  By this time Donnell was all grown up, himself in college, studying genetics. Texas Tech. It is the way of cowboys in and around Throckmorton: so many of them having been raised there, playing six-man football for the (2005 and 2011 State Champion!) Throckmorton Greyhounds. (“It’s not the dog in the fight, it’s the fight in the DAWG!”) Guys like Donnell have a postgrad gig already lined up if they want it—family ranches that need them. But even Donnell had to have a business plan—something to add to grow the ranch—before he could rise up in the ranks.

  Donnell said, “Dad,” when he came home with his degree in 1993. He said, “It’s better to be on the leading edge than the bleeding edge.” In some ways, his father may have been ahead of his time, Donnell thought. He was creating superior beef, absolutely, but not necessarily beef the marketplace understood. Donnell brought science back from college, but mostly Donnell brought marketing.

  Never a place for subtleties, the market understood: Angus. Aggressive marketing by the American Angus Association has, over the past quarter century, made “Angus” synonymous with “best steak in the wo
rld.” Specifically Black Angus, even though, without the hide, a Red and a Black Angus carcass are indistinguishable. But the American Angus Association promoted Black, and so in today’s marketplace, solid-black cattle, for entirely aesthetic reasons, bring top dollar.

  “We have to create the meat that people want to buy!” was, and remains, Donnell’s main point. Rob agrees, of course, but on the other hand he has the soul of an inventor and can’t stop thinking of awesome new things to try. The father is the boy in this relationship. Donnell: buttoned-up, doing the right thing, selling it with a smile. Rob: trial and error and fun.

  Donnell redirected the R.A. Brown Ranch—which still offers its Hotlander composite—away from fancy hybrid breeds and to an Angus focus with a twist: to become the premier Red Angus breeder, and have the superior genetics to prove it.

  And he had those superior genetics in Revelation. He had them.

  —

  FOR A YEAR AND A HALF, the vets worked on Revelation’s leg. Surgery and rehab, surgery and rehab and surgery. Finally, and for the last time, in August 2008, the vet shook his head: “No.”

  “Okay, then,” Donnell said. “Okay.”

  “It was like a close friend dying of cancer,” he says today. “You’re almost relieved when it’s over. Almost.”

  He did not say good-bye. He is not a sentimental man. He sent Revelation to the packinghouse, where the bull got converted into 1,200 pounds of hamburger. Sometimes now he wishes he could have saved Revelation’s head like a deer’s and mounted it. Sometimes he does think that way.