The Blackshirt Feeders cattle yard currently holds 50,000 head at full capacity, but when fully built out it will house four times that, which will make it the largest feedlot in the world. It will have over a square mile of rolled concrete for the cows to stand on, which will also prevent manure from penetrating into the water table. Instead, it will be shunted into giant digesters, which will capture the methane released by decomposition and burn it for energy, an arrangement that allows the owners to burnish their environmentalist bona fides.
The operation is not only big, it is innovative. A normal feedlot operates by buying weaned calves on the open market. Raised by ranches large and small, sometimes aggregated by middlemen, these are a hodgepodge of breeds and genetic profiles, grouped together by approximate age and size. Blackshirt takes a different approach. Instead of buying cows on the open market, it controls them all the way through.
The Blackshirt steers actually start as dairy/beef crosses. While a dairy cow’s genetics are, unsurprisingly, less suited to meat production than those of a beef cow, there are significant benefits to this approach. Artificial insemination is extremely rare in beef herds but is the norm for dairy cows. Dairies commonly have thousands or tens of thousands of cows, meaning a contract with a single dairy farm can provide a huge number of animals.
Put these together and Blackshirt has a degree of genetic control never before seen in beef production. It can track the performance of each animal from birth through slaughter and use the information gathered from tens of thousands of individuals to inform future genetic decisions.
These may sound like boring, technical points (fine, they are boring technical points) but their implications cannot be overstated. First, it is the same sort of vertically integrated model that has long been the norm in chicken and beef production. Beef has always been a holdout, with almost all animals beginning life on an independently owned farm or ranch. Blackshirt does contract with other farms, but it determines the genetics used, the feed and health program, and so on.
Second, by combining this sort of scale with genetic control, Blackshirt aims to make the same rapid gains in growth and feed efficiency that poultry and pork producers, or dairy cows for that matter, have achieved by applying tightly linked performance data to genetic selection. The beef herd has always been too dispersed for such a program, but with the advent of operations like Blackstone that is no longer the case.
In other words, beef is starting to resemble the other major livestock industries, with consolidated control throughout. The fewer and fewer independent farmers involved work on a contract rather than an ownership basis, and they will inevitably have to grow to remain viable, until they are large agricultural service providers rather than anything you’d call a farm or ranch.
~
There is one lone holdout. So far as I can tell the sheep industry shows no signs of this sort of consolidation. This is not because of some high mindedness or nostalgia on the part of Hormel, but because Americans only eat a miniscule amount of lamb compared to poultry, pork, and beef. There is simply not enough demand for sheep to justify an industry on the scale of other livestock.
A shepherd may not cut quite the same figure as a cowboy in the popular imagination, but I’m nevertheless all for an ovine future. For the small farmer sheep have a lot going for them. They take up much less space than cows, and they are much less expensive to buy. Unlike cows, they generally can’t kill or maim their owners. As a rule they are docile, though they have more personality than their reputation suggests.
I don’t see any quick fixes for the agricultural system. Building something better will take generations of people diligently working to tend their gardens and their flocks. Industrial agriculture can cheapen food in every sense of the word, but there will always be corners it can’t be bothered to touch — heirlooms tomatoes, good winter squash, and sheep. And this, I’m happy to say, is a fine foundation on which to build.