by Ted Genoways
If, instead, the Hammonds used electronic identification (EID) ear tags, which have a fifteen-digit visual label specific to each individual and also contain a chip that can be read by an EID reader, then there would be no need to brand the cattle at all. The high-tech tags would make it easier to monitor animals both within the herd and to track down strays in the event of an escape. When we talked about it later, Rick allowed that EID tags would work fine for maverick calves or cows that wander off when an electric fence shorts out, but those ear tags are easily removed by anyone whose intention is theft. “You don’t want your herd to cross the fence, and EID won’t cure that,” he said. “Especially if someone rustles them.”
The idea of modern-day rustling sounds incredible, but with the price of cattle reaching record highs, worries about calf thefts had ranchers on edge from Texas to the Dakotas. The Nebraska Brand Committee, tasked with overseeing cattle brand registrations and enforcement over the western two-thirds of the state, reported that it had recovered more than 1,500 lost or rustled cattle between summer 2013 and 2015, at a total value of more than $5 million. Only a few weeks before the Hammonds starting their branding, three Omaha men had been arrested in connection with a series of at least seventeen thefts from feedlots and farms from western Iowa to Lincoln.
While that case was unusual in its daring, it was hardly isolated. The newspapers had been crowded with rustling stories, often simple crimes of impulse or opportunity, a weak moment when an unbranded weaned calf was spotted alone near a fence line or had strayed off property. But other incidents were clearly more planned out. Some law enforcement officials said that the crime wave was fueled by the meth epidemic—a strange confluence of rising rural addiction and soaring sale barn values for cattle. When a calf can go for over a thousand dollars, Rick explained, the temptation is too great and the risk of loss too severe to let yourself feel squeamish about the prospect of branding. There’s a reason for the old saying: “Trust everyone, but brand your damn cattle.”
So one by one, Rick used the herding paddles to guide the young males down the chute. As each calf was clamped into the cradle and swiveled onto its side, the vet swiftly administered a series of inoculations, and Jesse pressed the electric brand, a large R Diamond, into its right flank. Jesse cut an unlikely figure for the job. His long curly hair was bunched into a ponytail and tucked through the hole at the back of his camouflage Pioneer baseball cap. He wore a bright red Vermont t-shirt that read JEEZUM CROW and white wraparound ski sunglasses to shield his eyes. Each time he applied the brand, thick billows of white smoke instantly engulfed him, and the air filled with the smell of burning hair and cauterized flesh. The calves usually let out a single, low moo then dropped silent. Right after, Kyle would slice into the calf’s scrotum, cut out its testicles, and toss them aside into the dirt.
Later, after the task was complete, I asked Kyle if the branding and castrating bothered him at all or if he just regarded it as a necessary task. “I really don’t think the branding hurts them too much,” Kyle said. “I mean, it burns, but then it cauterizes the wound immediately.” He said that they do freeze brands with identification numbers on the flanks of the cows when they get bigger, using a brand dipped in liquid nitrogen. The cold cauterization creates a white brand that stands out against the black hide of the Angus cattle, making it possible to pick out specific cows even at night or if they lose their ear tags. “They complain about that more than the hot brand,” Kyle said. “And the castration—well, I can’t imagine that it feels too good, but I just try to be quick about it. Some people use a bander that applies a tight plastic band at the base of the scrotum, so that everything just drops off after a few days of the blood not circulating. I don’t know if that’s more humane—some people think so. For us, we think it’s better to just cut them, so it’s quick and clean, and if we get them out onto grass right afterward, there’s pretty much no chance of infection.”
After another hour of branding and cutting, Rick stretched his arms over the rails of the corral, letting his gloved hands dangle loose as he caught his breath from chasing calves into the chute. “You know, everybody worries about the branding,” he said, “but if I had to choose between being branded and being castrated . . .” He ducked his head, so he had me clearly in his sights. “Well, which would you choose?” As he chuckled to himself, Jesse called out the new calf’s tag number. Meghan marked it down and then stomped off without a word. She pulled off her yellow stocking cap and crammed it in her back pocket, dangling like a penalty flag.
Later, she explained that Rick had gone to the trouble to move away from hormones and antibiotics used by other ranchers to bulk up their animals, putting the family in a position to charge a premium for their beef, but hot-branding is strictly prohibited if you want to get the top dollar that goes along with Animal Welfare Approved certification. Because many small producers in Nebraska were applying for that label—as well as organic, non-GMO, kosher, and other specialty labels—the Hammonds struggled to sell their beef directly to consumers looking to buy from independent farmers. So most of their cattle, despite being grass-fed, hormone-free, and antibiotic-free, wound up at the sale barn with everyone else’s cattle, often to be purchased by Cargill or Tyson or some feedlot that fattens its cattle on corn and growth promoters to sell to those packers. At auction, Rick could command a small premium because his cattle were designated as NI—no implants—but that higher price would be offered only because the buyer knew those cattle would respond to hormones and bulk up faster when they were injected in the feedlot. To Meghan’s mind, it was a lot of extra work for the Hammonds, keeping their herd healthy and drug-free, only to have their cattle wind up just like all the other cattle out there.
Rick saw hot-branding in just the opposite light. Not only does it protect your herd from rustling, but when you go to the sale barn, the brand on your cattle becomes your brand as a company. In the western part of Nebraska, brands, checked and approved by government inspectors, are required to sell all cattle; in the eastern part of the state, they’re not required or checked, so it’s not at all unusual to see unbranded cattle. Rick told me that his cattle, with their distinctive brands burned into their rumps, sent a message to sale barn buyers that his cows had been raised in a traditional way, spending half their lives on open rangelands in western Nebraska. And he didn’t deny that the practice made him feel connected to a time when cattle grazed over broad expanses on the unfenced prairie and had to be branded with irons reddened in the coals of a campfire just to assure that professional marauders didn’t make off with a rancher’s livelihood. “It’s the cowboy mystique,” Rick said unapologetically, and he said that he considered that way of raising cattle part of the R Diamond identity.
As each brand was set, Jesse rotated the cradle back to vertical and released the trap with a foot-operated pedal, letting the calf leap out into a holding pen with the others. When all the new calves had finally been inoculated, branded, and castrated, we all sat on overturned buckets in the narrow shade of the barn, eating sandwiches and drinking sodas. Meghan explained that they expected to have maybe 130 calves. Fifty would go out to pasture for the summer near Valentine, in the northwest corner of the state, and the other 80, split up into two separate trailer loads, would go out to Rick’s land around Curtis. The calves they had branded and castrated that day were ready for pasture now. Soon they would be loaded up for western Nebraska.
“And they’re all new calves—from this year?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re only two months old by the time they go,” Meghan said.
I studied her a moment, trying to gauge her patience. She had finally ditched her stocking cap for good as the day grew warmer, and the bustle and unease of branding seemed to be draining out of her.
“You know,” I ventured, “from my perspective, the branding and all, it seemed like it went—”
“It was good,” Meghan interjected. She leaned over and slugged me in the shoulder, as if to sign
al that the subject was closed. “It’s hard on the calves, and it’s hard on the people,” she said. “But, yeah, otherwise, it was good.”
PART THREE
SEEDS OF CHANGE
May 2015
Dave flipped open the lid of a yellow hopper at the rear of the John Deere planter, then lifted a 20-kilo bag of seeds and balanced it in the crook of his elbow. The bag was made of brown paper, like a grocery sack, and printed with a pale green stripe and bold lettering: FEMALE PARENT CORN. Stitched to the top were two coded identification tags listing the batch number, the lot number, where these parent seeds had been grown, and the exact number of seeds per kilogram. Overhead, the sky was slate-gray and threatening, but the steady rains of the last week had finally relented enough to get the seed corn planting underway.
Dave pulled a tab at the bottom of the bag, unzipping the seam like pulling a ripcord, and the seeds poured out until the hopper was full. The turquoise-tinted kernels inside had been treated with a mix of insecticides and fungicides developed by DuPont Pioneer chemists to kill off beetles and aphids and to knock down infections that can slow seed emergence and leafing out. The coating’s candy color is just a dye, a reminder to farmers that their seeds are covered with potent chemicals and should be handled with care. But Dave wore a plaid Western shirt, torn off at the shoulders, no sleeves, no gloves, nothing more than his glasses and a Pioneer cap for protective gear.
Once the individual hoppers were filled, one for each planting row, Dave emptied the last of the bags into the bulk bin, then climbed into the tractor’s cab. He started the onboard computer, and a fan whirred to life, pressurizing the planting system, sucking up kernels, and sending them rattling through a series of tentacle-like hoses, each extending to one of the small square bins. Underneath, a V-shaped pair of opener blades was set to cut a trench to precisely the right depth, followed by a nozzle from the mini-hopper to drop seeds according to an infrared sensor, and finally a close wheel that would cover the seed and pack the soil to the appropriate density. The hoppers stretched for a dozen furrows in either direction, but on that day, Dave had the system set for planting seed corn, so for every four rows of female seed, there would be a blank row to fill in later with males.
Seeing that everything looked good, Dave eased the planter to the edge of the field, lowered the blades, and started, slowly, across the acres of dark soil, watching over his shoulder to make sure the right pattern was unfurling behind him. Ordinarily, the Hammonds do no-till planting. With no-till, the farmer plants right through the stubble of last year’s crop and the tangle of subsequent weeds, using a coulter blade, sharp and wide enough to slice through roots and open a seed trench. By leaving those root systems in place, farmers can reduce erosion and topsoil loss—and, ideally, reduce the use of chemical fertilizers. But for some reason, Dave wasn’t really sure why, Pioneer still preferred tillage to prepare a bed for its seed corn fields. So Rick had gone over the field with a one-pass soil finisher, a massive contraption that unfolds into a twenty-four-row, pull-behind tiller that combines a line of discs and a set of miniature coulters. “You can see it’s been worked,” Dave said, pointing out the distinctive corduroy lines. Behind us a plume of dust swept east across the field, rising like a growing whirlwind, even after all the spring rains.
As we moved, Dave showed me where the planted seeds were filling in the virtual field on the touchscreen and how the planter was varying the density of seed populations according to the pre-programmed prescription for the field. Apex, the software created by John Deere to control everything from the GPS-guided autosteer to planter row shutoffs, made it so that he didn’t have to do anything but get the planter to the appropriate starting point and hit go. The Hammonds began using the system about five years before, but he still hadn’t warmed up to the change. “I would rather do it here,” Dave said, “but a lot of it, it won’t let you. You got to go through Apex, and I can’t figure out the goddamned thing. So Kyle, he helps me get it all set.”
Months earlier, when the plans were still being drawn up, Kyle had shown me how this field was mapped and entered into Apex. It was cold outside that day, the space heater in the shop at Centennial Hill buzzing with effort, but Kyle was hunkered down at the computer, double-checking everything. “Rick told me to sit down and figure out what we were going to plant for seeds, all the herbicides for the fields, the fertilizers,” he said. “That’s pretty big, you know? Especially with prepaying. It’s kind of a tough thing to do cost-wise, because we’re still in the middle of selling. I’m trying to do research and get the best plan put together. It’s definitely more responsibility. It’s, like, a $300,000 purchase that he pretty much isn’t overseeing at all.”
To an outsider, it may look simple to raise row crops: just plant a seed and watch it grow. But with commodities prices still under the cost of production—corn stalled under $4 per bushel, soybeans under $10—farmers were making tough decisions about where to spend on inputs. A survey by the Progressive Farmer in Omaha found that landowners were planning to invest less in hybrid seeds and scale back as much as possible on fertilizer and chemicals for weeds and pests. “It’s all a trade-off,” Kyle said. “Soybeans are still doing better than corn, but if you’re not rotating, then you’re losing fertility. So you make more this year, but maybe you’re shooting yourself in the foot for next year.” The stakes were especially ratcheted up by the University of Nebraska’s annual survey of farm values, which showed that properties across the state had taken a hit. Even irrigated acres in the north-central region, which contained York and Hamilton counties, were off. So the collateral backing everyone’s loans was losing value—raising the specter of what could happen if debts were ever called in as they had been a generation ago. It was a high-risk moment for Rick to hand over the reins. Kyle understood what a vote of confidence it was, but he also knew that he couldn’t afford to screw it up. And right now, the top moneymaker was the seed corn fields. He had to do them right.
“This light gray area is the isolation zone,” Kyle said, showing me an empty spot on the western edge of the field. “So what they’re saying is: you have to be 165 feet away from the neighbor’s yellow corn. That’s actually a Nebraska state law, to have at least that much setback so you don’t get cross-pollination. And you can put whatever you want in that isolation, as long as it’s not corn. So we plant soybeans there. And then there are fourteen rows of male corn. That’s what’s called border rows. They help ensure pollination.” Finally, down the center of the field map was an alternating patchwork of four rows marked for females and single rows for males.
This whole process of forced cross-pollination in order to produce robust seed corn is arguably the most important development in the last century of agriculture. For all the talk about tractors and center-pivot irrigation systems, the emergence of reliable seed, more than anything else, has turned cycles of catastrophic loss and foreclosure into a reliable if ever-changing business. A hundred years ago, my great-grandfather L. C. Genoways was one of the most successful seed corn producers in Hamilton and York counties. L.C.’s seed corn received “most of the important prizes” awarded by the Nebraska Farmers’ Institute in its early years and by 1930 was reported to be “sought after far and wide,” but corn seeds in those days were all coming from open-pollinated populations, which means that even seeds that came from the same ear were each genetically distinct. So much genetic variability made it impossible to steadily improve yields, because selecting the best seed came down to eyeballing kernels and hand-selecting based on experience of past years. Even sophisticated breeders, like L.C., who knew how to cross-pollinate, would breed two varieties one year and get large, healthy ears, only to find that the same two varieties produced scraggly cobs with missing kernels and dead tips the next. So if you look at USDA records for corn yields from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the 1930s, you’ll see that—despite huge advances in planting and harvesting equipment, fertilizers, and pest control—the p
er-acre average remained right around twenty-five bushels for more than sixty-five years.
That all changed with the arrival of a corn breeder who one plant geneticist at the University of Nebraska told me was “the Bill Gates of the seed industry.”
HENRY A. WALLACE, known to friends and family as H.A., was the son of Henry C. Wallace, the longtime president of the Corn Belt Meat Producers Association and a liberal-minded professor at Iowa State Agricultural College who counted George Washington Carver among his students. Carver took young H.A. on daily walks, teaching him about parts of flowers and the reproductive processes of native grasses. As Carver gained international fame at the Tuskegee Institute for finding new uses for peanuts as a way of supporting poor, small-plot African American farmers in the South, Wallace was beginning his own studies at Iowa State and dreaming of similarly transforming corn production for poor white farmers in the Midwest.
When he was still a student, Wallace began experimenting with hybridization. Rediscovering Gregor Mendel’s groundbreaking research on pea pods, he hit upon the key insight that the only solution to overcoming corn’s genetic variability was to first produce consistent varieties, with each kernel the same, that could be used as “parents,” year after year. It was possible to achieve this level of artificial selection because of two peculiarities of corn plant anatomy and reproduction. First, corn plants are all naturally hermaphroditic. The male flower of a corn plant is called the tassel; the ear with its corn silk is the female flower. Under normal conditions, the silks of a corn plant are pollinated by the tassels of neighboring plants, but if pollen from other plants isn’t available, corn has a second peculiarity: the hermaphroditic parts are capable of self-pollinating.