Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  The stench hit me as soon as I got out of the car, five miles out from Burlington, Colorado. It took a while to remember where I’d smelled something similar. But then it came back to me that it had been in the 1970s, at Wetheriggs, just across the M6 from Penrith in Cumbria, where the carcases of fallen animals were being rendered into pet food and glue. With the wind from the west and a good boil going, the smell permeated the whole town and beyond. Tighter regulations over emissions have now reduced it.

  But not in Burlington, where tens of thousands of cattle – mainly the unwanted cheap bull calves of ultra-high-yielding Holsteins – are penned outside, with no bedding or shelter, in huge wooden-fenced stockades. Fed on a scientifically computed ration of corn (maize), chopped silage of triticale (a cross between wheat and rye) and soya bean meal, laced with growth promoters and antibiotics, they lie in their own muck (dry in summer and a quagmire in winter) without shade. Every mouthful is carried to them in feed wagons and once they are sent off to slaughter every particle of muck is either carted away or washed into big lagoons. This is a shocking place in its stark, uncompromising lack of sentiment. Everything is calculated to make the most return for the least outlay on the management and welfare of the animals penned there. By contrast, a fortune is spent on the latest machinery needed to grow and harvest the soya beans, corn and triticale that feeds the animals, and to chop it and cart it to them in the pens.

  The often-heard justification for feedlots is that such intensive enterprises are necessary to feed the world’s growing population. But all the vegetables consumed in the US are grown on just three million acres. And there are 35 million acres of lawn in America; they might make a start producing food from that before they claim it’s necessary to confine cattle in feedlots. Americans are obsessed with mowing their ‘backyards’ – often within an inch of their lives. Even in the poorest places in the back country of West Virginia and Kentucky, where everyone seems to live in cabins and trailers, I saw dozens of fat people bouncing and wobbling on ride-on mowers over the grass surrounding their homes, with not a vegetable garden or poultry run in sight. Americans spend the smallest proportion of their income on food of nearly any nation in the world – 9.6 per cent – and they expect it to be like that, with the result that much of the food they eat is manufactured from denatured cheap ingredients and is clearly harming them.

  The feedlot business treats cattle as nothing more than units of beef production. Holstein steers are not worth very much and will fatten to great weights on government-subsidized corn and soya, grown with genetically modified seed, using herbicide sprays that obviate the need for weeding. Large numbers of Holstein cattle can be fed effectively in feedlots, whereas they would never get fat from grazing alone – or at least not from the grazing available on the High Plains in Colorado. When oil and fertilizer are relatively cheap and the government subsidizes corn and soya, it is profitable to keep animals like this so long as water is easily and abundantly available for growing the crops to feed them.

  On the High Plains this can be had by tapping into the Ogallala Aquifer that underlies this part of Colorado and stretches from Nebraska into northern Texas. Any disease caused by crowding cattle together in their own muck is kept at bay with antibiotics, and steroid growth hormones ensure that they make the most of the feed they consume and produce cheap beef to satisfy the American market.

  Two thirds of all beef cattle and 90 per cent of cattle finished in feedlots in the US are given one or more of five hormones to increase their growth and feed conversion rate. Steroids have been approved in the US for cattle rearing since the 1950s. A voluntary planned phasing-out of certain antibiotics has been agreed between the FDA and agricultural chemical companies to try to stop the routine feeding of those drugs considered essential to protect human health. Not surprisingly, the feedlot producers have objected, saying they cannot manage without them. But when Denmark banned their routine administration to intensively reared pigs, though illness increased at first, as husbandry practices improved, the animals suffered no more illness than they had when they were given antibiotics routinely.

  Burlington Feeders Inc. is one of 30,000 ‘feeding enterprises’ in the USA, which range from 1,000 head of cattle to 100,000. Their critics nickname such places ‘Cowschwitz’. On 1 January 2016, there were just over 13 million cattle in feedlots, with 80 per cent of those in feedlots with a greater capacity than 1,000, which are euphemistically called concentrated animal feeding operations (inevitably abbreviated to CAFOs). Seventy-five per cent of all beef consumed in the US comes from CAFOs.

  When I visited, they were harvesting triticale (which makes up about half the diet of the cattle), with huge mowers racing across the circular quarter-section they were cutting. In semi-arid parts of the US, cropping land is made up of circles, watered by a centre-pivoted irrigation system. The Burlington enterprise crops nine of these circles – about 1,400 acres. I asked one resident why local people did not complain about the perpetual stink. He said that Americans generally do not complain about what their neighbours are doing, and the feedlot is big business and a sign of progress, both of which Americans tend to admire. The smell is just an unfortunate consequence that has to be put up with.

  It is all highly mechanized and efficient. The cattle never go into the fields to graze, and are medicated with growth hormones, so they are docile to manage. Most feedlot operators take in cattle to finish for beef, and are happy to fill their pens with high-maintenance steers that eat a lot and take a long time to finish. They do not want cattle that fatten too quickly because they would have to find others to fill the vacancy. They also produce a uniform product, with no seasonal variations of appearance or taste, which is what the American supermarkets say the consumer wants.

  In 2015, the US produced a record 14 billion bushels (392 million tons) of corn – the basis of both feedlot farming and the processed food industry, as well as ethanol production. There are about 90 million acres devoted to maize growing and 90 million acres to soya – half of which is exported, while a large part of the other half goes into animal feed. These crops are grown as industrial monocultures on a huge scale and are the foundations of cheap meat and processed food. They are underwritten by the US farm subsidy programme, which puts more than $25 billion a year into farming and encourages mono-cropping on large farms, particularly those growing these types of crops. Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage are two important subsidies the American farmer receives to make up the difference between the market price and a guaranteed price set by the government. It is not hard to see why it is in the interests of the corn grower and the feedlot operator that the price of corn should be low.

  All this is a far cry from what Kit Pharo is trying to do a few miles down the road towards Cheyenne Wells. When he was a young man, newly married and looking for work outside the rodeo season, he had the dubious honour of driving into the ground the first post to make the fence for the first pen on the feedlot. He is too diplomatic and lives too close to his neighbours to say anything critical about Burlington Feeders Inc., but the diametrically opposed way in which he manages his cattle and his pastures says it all.

  Kit’s ranch is halfway between Burlington and Cheyenne Wells. He ‘raises seed stock’ – breeds bulls – from his herd of 160 black and red Aberdeen Angus (or Angus, as they call them here) cows. His stock rearing is the antithesis of feedlot farming and sod-busting, with the simple aim of creating cattle that have characteristics as close as possible to those of the buffalo – hardy, self-reliant, frugal, resilient survivors that will thrive all year round on the available grazing and little else.

  Kit’s farming philosophy and reputation rest on the simple principle of matching his cows to their environment. This might seem like basic common sense, but to many who resist the truth of it, he is a lunatic. To others, he is a prophet crying in the wilderness that is modern American cattle farming. It comes as a revelation to those ranchers who keep cattle that are too hig
h-maintenance for their circumstances. As Kit points out, the weaning weights of calves have steadily increased over the last 40-odd years, and yet most cattle farmers are struggling to make a profit. Those who were making a profit from calves weaned at 450 lb are now losing money with calves weaned at 600 lb.

  Why? Because they are buying ever more expensive inputs to artificially adapt the environment to the cow, rather than the other way round. This has resulted in the average cost of raising a beef calf increasing from $384 in 2000 to $883 in 2014. And this is exactly the opposite of the way it should be. Growing and finishing cattle on grass results in a greater profit because there are no costs to set against it. And grass-grown beef is also better for you, because it contains far more vitamins, minerals and healthy fats – 50 per cent more iron, four times more omega-3, twice as much beta-carotene and much more vitamin A and E. Plus it contains no hormones, pesticides or antibiotics. As Kit points out, cattle are ruminants. They are designed to extract the energy from herbage through their four stomachs. They were not made to eat grains. And yet in feedlots their diet contains large amounts of grain. Grazing cattle is the only sustainable way to farm the grasslands of America – and the world – and produce food while building fertility.

  On Kit Pharo’s landing there is a romantic picture of a buffalo standing with his head down into a blizzard, caked with blown snow, defiant, proud, indomitable, the supreme survivor. The American buffalo is Kit’s touchstone – the finest grazing animal that ever lived on the grasslands of the world – and the sales of his bulls depend on the extent to which his cattle emulate its qualities. With one crucial difference: the succulent meat from his range-bred Angus cattle is far superior to the buffalo’s stringy dark flesh.

  Kit sells bulls all over the US, as well as to Canada, Australia and Mexico, and franchises his genetics to other breeders so they can implant into their own cows embryos impregnated by his bulls. In all, he sells between 900 and 1,000 bulls a year. At his recent sale in autumn 2017, he sold 315 bulls – 184 Angus, 98 Red Angus and 33 of other breeds – at an average price of $4,900.

  His cattle live outside all year round and are never fed, apart from hay in a ‘doozy of a storm’ when the snow is too deep for them to reach the grass below. His bulls do well wherever they go because there are few places where the conditions are tougher than where they are reared. Their lives are as natural as possible, with one cow and her calf having the grazing of about 30 acres of natural perennial grassland.

  On the short-grass prairie of the High Plains, 150 years after the annihilation of the buffalo, the Angus is now the dominant grazing animal. By selecting calves from cows that can survive with little if any supplementary feeding, Kit Pharo has created cattle that ‘fit their environment’. They can produce calves on ‘what nature provides for them’. He describes these cows as ‘adapted cows’ that have ‘very low-maintenance requirements’. In other words, they can maintain themselves because they have a greater capacity to extract the energy from their grazing than other breeds of higher-maintenance cattle.

  The land here lies about 5,000 feet above sea level, and whilst not completely flat, it only rises a few feet to low ridges and bluffs and undulates into dried-up creeks and hollows, with little variation for hundreds of miles in every direction. There is an old plainsman’s saying that you can sit on your porch in this part of Colorado and watch your dog run away from home for three days. In early June, the temperature is in the nineties all day, with a steady droughty wind blowing across the land, under a relentless sun.

  Eastern Colorado had been suffering an extended drought for the last three years and there was little prospect of rain when I was there. Only the pale primrose-yellow flowers of the yucca plants seemed unaffected, standing sentinel on deep roots above their frieze of spiky drought-resistant leaves, which the Indians used to weave into baskets and utensils. The yucca spikes above the prairie like the prairie dogs that stand sentry on top of the hard-beaten mounds of earth above their burrows. They sometimes share these with the burrowing owl, which takes over the holes of other prairie creatures. When an owl finds itself threatened in its borrowed burrow, it imitates the sound of a rattlesnake, to fool and deter predators.

  Apart from the heat and the relentless sunshine, this land reminded me of the high Pennines. I half expected a troop of Swaledale sheep to come out of one of the hollows. And Kit’s cattle are managed in a similar way to the best flocks of Swaledales – only fed in the worst weather, and adapted to the terroir where they live as naturally as possible.

  ‘How do you deal with calving problems out on the prairie?’

  ‘We shoot ’em,’ Kit replied, only half joking. They certainly select them so that they aren’t breeding from cows that can’t calve without outside help. They do rope calves that need treatment, but only in extremis; animals showing signs of weakness are culled, on the principle that if you breed from defective stock, your stock will become defective. Over 30 years or more, Kit has created a self-reliant type of cow that hardly ever gives trouble. He breeds for as much resilience as possible – even resistance to flies – to avoid veterinary treatment. His herd builds up immunity to disease, rather than him treating it when it arises. Keep the ‘medium’ right and disease will not take hold. He is with Béchamp and Bernard, rather than Pasteur, and believes in as little intervention as possible.

  Drought, or drouth as they call it out here, is the hardest privation to deal with because it retards the growth of grass and hunger weakens the cows. It can be managed by reducing the size of the herd well in advance of trouble, or by weaning calves early to avoid them demanding from their mothers milk they could live without. Early weaning gives the cow the chance to put on flesh before the next punishing winter. It is better to sell half the herd than to weaken them all and risk losing the whole lot to starvation. And if the worst comes to the worst – and it often does on the plains – sell them all, put the money in the bank until the rain comes and then restock. At least that way you will have the wherewithal to buy more cows. Buying feed to keep a herd alive for a period whose end cannot be foreseen has left many a farmer with starving cows worth little or nothing and bankrupted him. If you wait until the last minute to sell, you will find that everybody else has done the same and nobody will want your thin cows.

  There is truth in the land that cannot be ignored. These plains were meant for and made by grazing animals. Charles Goodnight, the legendary nineteenth-century cattleman, pronounced the Great Plains ‘the richest sod on earth’, and yet just over a century ago, the US government encouraged the destruction of the buffalo, drove off the Plains Indians and parcelled out the land to homesteaders, who were encouraged to turn the sod over and grow wheat. ‘God didn’t create this land around here to be plowed up. He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad.’ As Kit Pharo says, ‘Any time the government gets involved in farming, farmers become idiots.’

  Ploughing up a million acres of permanent pasture on the Great Plains and killing the ancient grasses released vast quantities of carbon that had been stored for millennia in the plants and the soil. The annual ploughing that followed continued this release of carbon, until, having used up all the fertility, farmers have come to depend on chemical fertilizers to feed their crops. The deepest and most fertile soils on earth were, and are, under grass. These pastures are kept young and productive by grazing herbivores taking in the grass (biomass), digesting it, and excreting fertility in their dung and urine, which then grows more grass. But modern farming that depends on artificial fertilizers and annual crops removes this biomass, which is then lost to the cycle of fertility. Every civilization in history was built on deep, fertile soils created and sustained by grazing livestock. Any that neglected their soil did not last long. As for the claim that plants are more productive and ecosystems do not need animals, there are no healthy ecosystems on earth that are devoid of animals. Without animals, all soils grow sterile and eventually become desert.

>   You will hear it argued that cattle (and other herbivores) are inefficient users of herbage, in the sense that they excrete more of what they eat than they process. But that is precisely the point. An average cow eats 28 lb of plant-based food a day, drinks about 50 gallons of water and excretes 50 lb of muck. Her muck and urine are balm to the soil. They feed microorganisms, healthy bacteria, worms and a whole array of creatures whose actions create humus and increase the soil’s water-holding capacity. A cow’s manure is a magic product. Just ask any gardener what is the best fertilizer to transform soil into a productive medium. While compost is valuable, it is but a pale shadow of what has passed through a cow. The cow is an alchemist that transforms the base metal of sunlight, via vegetation, into the gold that is its manure.

  A cow not only turns poor vegetation into rich manure and urine, but at the same time it prunes the old growth and stimulates the new, which over time encourages the grass to develop deep and extensive roots. Unlike most other plants, grass grows from the root, so pruning the tip makes its stems tiller out and increases its growth, which allows it to convert more sunlight into vegetation, which in turn decomposes, transpires and feeds the process of ‘sequestration’ of carbon. This is the much-mentioned, but little understood, ‘carbon cycle’, in which carbon combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide, absorb the carbon and excrete oxygen. And the whole process is hugely encouraged by grazing herbivores. Permanent grass is the marvellous natural covering of a third of the earth, and permanent grasslands are a more efficient store of carbon than any other ecosystem on the planet.

  Most of the world’s land, especially on the Great Plains, is unsuitable for ploughing: it is either too steep or the soil is too thin, or there is too little or too much rain. But grass in all its manifestations grows naturally over a large part of our planet. Grasslands are the lungs of the earth, kept in good health by their natural complement, grazing animals; a wonderful partnership that maintains the well-being of the planet. That is why grazing cattle must be at the heart of any sustainable farming system. And that is why Kit Pharo’s Angus cows will, over time, repair the terrible damage done to this land and restore its health.