Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Industrialization of Livestock Production: Reducing the Role of Nature.
Nowhere
in agriculture has there been more reorganization toward factory-corporate farming than
in livestock. This has been especially true for broilers, feedlot cattle, and hogs, where in
the past fifty years large factory-corporate firms have come to dominate what were once
family farms with small numbers of livestock (Kilman 1994; McBride 1997). For instance,
from 1969 to 1992, there was rising concentration in all livestock industries except cow-calf
farms (McBride 1997).
The general trend has been to remove stock from an open environment and rear them
in climate-controlled barns. In terms of our model, new technologies—in disease control,
handling, nutrition, and transportation—have reduced seasonality by increasing the number
of cycles per year (prediction 9.4) and reduced the importance and variability of random
shocks from nature (prediction 9.5). Compared to field crops, livestock production allows
for greater reduction of natural forces because stocks are mobile during growing stages and
can often be reared indoors.
The most striking example of factory-corporate livestock production is in feedlot cattle.
In the first half of this century “farmer-feeders,” located primarily in the Corn Belt, supplied
the overwhelming majority of finished cattle to slaughterhouses (Martin 1979, Thompson
and O'Mary 1983). These farmers typically had less than 1,000 head of cattle that were
purchased in late summer or fall and fattened during the late fall and winter (an off-season
for grain farming). During the last forty years, the fed cattle industry has been almost
completely transformed into one dominated by large corporate firms that employ highly
specialized wage labor. The typical commercial feedlot produces fat cattle in a manner
similar to how Ford or GM produces cars: 500- to 600-pound feeder calves are converted
into finished cattle after four to five months of feeding and sold to slaughterhouses when
they are roughly 1,200 pounds. Production is largely removed from seasonal forces: Young
cattle are brought in and fat cattle are sold on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Labor is
highly specialized and includes accountants, feed buyers, cattle buyers, veterinarians, and
engineers, as well as less skilled laborers who operate feed mills, load and unload cattle
from trucks, and clean feeding pens. The
1997 Census of Agriculture
shows that huge firms
dominated the fed cattle industry; 640 firms with average sales of 31,909 head per year
accounted for over 75 percent of all fed cattle sold.
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The 1997 Census also reports that
just over one-half of all cattle sold and receipts generated come from feedlots organized as
corporations. Many of the cattle on commercial feedlots are actually owned by producers
who pay the feedlots for “custom feeding” (see Uvaceck 1983).
The cow-calf industry, which supplies young feeder cattle to commercial feedlots, could
not be more different. In the cow-calf system, beef brood cows produce a single calf (twins
are rare) each year. This calf is weaned after seven to eight months (weighing 500-600
pounds) and sold to feedlots. Firms in this industry average only 48 head per farm and
